What is a social networking bot and how is journalism involved?
A bot can control a social media account and automatically generate messages.
An internet bot is known as a web robot that runs several tasks on the internet. A social networking bot’s job is to convince people that the robot behind the account is a real person. Social networking bots have become common in different social media platforms such as Twitter, Facebook or Instagram. Social bots generate messages to advocate news, ideas, beliefs, and support in a specific campaign. Likewise, the account can build a public relationship by following someone.
Some reporters are starting to use different types of bots to help them find or collect information. Also, bots are being used to report breaking news or answer questions. For example, Ken Schwencke created five years ago Quakebot which is a bot to detect earthquakes from the United States Geological Survey. The bot wrote a breaking news tweet, but it shared information from an earthquake that happened in 1925. The image above is a Tweet from the Los Angeles Times explaining that the previous tweet contained information of a past earthquake.
The Real Press Sec. is famous among journalist, and educator Russel Neiss created the Real Press Sec. The account tweets statements posted by The White House. Every Time the President Donald Trump tweets it automatically obtains the information and puts them in an image.
So how can we identified if a web robot is behind the account?
Usually, accounts that don’t have personal information can be an account run by bots. If their profile or background pictures don’t say much about the person of the account and instead promotes political statements or other specific topics , think twice because it can be a bot. Secondly, if the accounts retweet or tweets too often (more than 20 times a day), it can show a sign of a bots account. Also, the followers of the account can also be run by bots, and the majority don’t have pictures at all. Moreover, accounts that have stolen pictures or that the names don’t match with the image can also be a sign. At the end, you are the judge.
Social bots have many specific jobs to do in different social media platforms. They can harm, and at the same time, they can help. Many journalists use it for research, while malicious bots can share misinformation to create confusion or hurt other people. Also, there are several accounts that in their name included the word “bot” such as @netflix_bot or @attention_cnn that are built to tweet news or new content automatically. Make sure to always double check the information before sharing.
