Can the bots be stopped?

A scholarly article in the latest issue of the leading Information Systems journal, Management Information Systems Quarterly (MISQ), entitled “Disinformation spillover: uncovering the ripple effect of bot-assisted fake social engagement on public attention” (Lee, S.; Shin, D.; Kwon, K. H.; Han, S. P.; and Lee, S. K., 2024, MISQ 48:3), discusses a well-documented case of the use of non-genuine accounts (bots) on a social network to assess their impact on users’ news consumption, searches, and politics.

The conclusion will surprise nobody with any knowledge of how social media work: bot-assisted fake social interaction operations disproportionately increase digital audiences’ attention not only to the manipulator’s area of interest (generally, news about politics), but also to keywords.

The idea of armies of fake accounts that simulate activity on social networks is not particularly novel: campaigns using letters supposedly sent by the public to convince Brutus to commit magnicide are mentioned in Shakespeare’s “Julius Caesar”. Astroturfing, the creation of fake grassroots campaigns, is derived from the well known brand of synthetic turf AstroTurf and well known in politics, and there are even companies like Crowds on Demand that can be hired, for example, to simulate public interest in unknown political candidates by cheering at their campaign events.