Dr. Gregor Wiedemann wrote a glossary entry on “social bots” for Diskursmonitor, a collaborative online platform that aims to educate and document strategic communication. This topic is marked by major controversy in academia, some of which has played out in public. Empirical bot research findings range from “A quarter of all election-related posts on platform XY are created by bots” to “We were unable to identify a single bot in our study.” This uncertainty means that bot research can be exploited to support various positions in the public debate.
You can read the entry here (in German)
Brief Summary
Social bots are computer programs capable of partially automating human users’ communication on social media. This includes posting, forwarding, liking, and responding to content, for example. There is no uniform definition of this phenomenon in scientific literature. Above all, there is disagreement about how “social” or “intelligent” a bot must be to be considered a social bot. Assessments of whether and to what extent social bots pose a threat to democratic societies are equally inconsistent.
Due to these uncertainties, social bots are a central topic of public controversy in the context of the digitization of social communication. Although social bots are sometimes attributed useful characteristics that benefit people’s information needs, media and political discourse dominate the idea of social bots as powerful instruments that covert interest groups use to influence political debates and democratic elections. When examining this idea, scientific discourse faces two challenges: first, available data sets on social bots do not adequately reflect reality on social media, and second, studies on the influence of bots cannot be repeated under the same conditions at a later date and thus verified.
On social media, the term “bot” is sometimes used to stigmatize a communication partner and accuse them of “insincerity,” “misguided reasoning,” or “naivety.”
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