Bot or not?
By Jarrod Benn
Technology is advancing day by day and influencing culture as it evolves, in ways good and bad. some technology is creating more jobs while some types of technology is taking a lot of jobs away, this proves how powerful technology can be. Technologies effects on newsrooms are already in place and for some reason it hasn’t taken the world by storm yet.
AI has been implemented in media in order to help deal with the trials and tribulations of the digital era. In high ranking media and news outlets AI has been allowed to select articles for readers and even throw more related stories their way due to algorithms. Algorithms have a lot to do with calculations, so this programmed story selection method is gathering information for readers and recommending things they like while hiding things they don’t.
This sounds pretty cool at face value, but the deeper you dig into the idea the weirder it gets.
Social media has been using algorithms to maintain people’s newsfeeds in order to prevent you from seeing spam as well as posts that aren’t relevant to you, there are bots that are in effect now and are programmed to spread misinformation. The speed of how fast misinformation can spread has proved how susceptible media is to bots and malicious programming.
In the article From bots to campaigners: how social media influences elections, there is an example of an abundance of bots that were used during President Trump’s 2016 campaign that eventually led to Trump releasing some highly controversial House of Representatives documents due to high demand from the accounts run by bots which seemed like real accounts.
These bots were programmed by someone or some people in order to spread an opinion that seemed to be shared by a wave of people when in reality it may have only been shared out by a small amount of people.
