BEWARE: Bots Have Taken Over Our (Digital) World
Don’t panic! Even though we are living in warped times, we aren’t quite living through an “I, Robot” crisis yet. From Apple’s Siri to automated website chatbots, artificial intelligence is everywhere around us. Once upon a time, we had to remember our best friend’s phone number in order to call and check up on them, but now we can just tell Siri to “call Renada” and voila! We are now catching up like old times. If you didn’t know, Renada is one of my good friends.
Bots are continuously making their way into the social media world as well. An article written by Richard Newman in the National Law Review cites recent findings from an FTC report that found about 37% of all Internet traffic is the work of digital bots that can influence the way advertisers spend money, consumer buying habits, and a host of other things. Innovation often comes with risks or tradeoffs. The article dives deep into despite 90% of bots being “good” (chatbots, aggregating website traffic information, etc.), that remaining 10% can be damaging to brands and the customer experience.
The Ten Percent
According to the report, about 10% of bots are “bad” as they engage in malicious activities such as hacking consumer information, spreading hate speech, and increasing fake followers. The issue with this from a digital marketing standpoint deals with how it affects ad spending for brands and consumer buying habits. When people are allowed to buy fake followers, it portrays them as having a larger base than what they actually have; consumers often connect a large base with more trustworthy or accurate information which may have them trusting sources that are sketchy. From a brand standpoint, they may spend advertising dollars with an influencer who has a heavy “fake follower” presence, leading to a lack of true engagement. You can see how just this one example misleads people in a variety of directions.
How Can We Fix This?
The FTC is taking “bot control” seriously, as companies continue to work on software to detect these bots and put an end to them. Even so, what role do you think social media platforms should have in regulating bots? Personally, I think we should hold social media platforms to a higher standard of making sure their sites protect their users from the harm and misinformation that can come from these social bots. Commissioner Rohit Chopra states in the article that “platforms may claim that it is difficult to detect bots, but they simultaneously sell advertisers on their ability to precisely target advertising based on extensive data on the lives, behaviors, and tastes of their users…” From this statement, it is hard for me to conclude that social platforms don’t have the ability to weed out bots from their sites. In order to facilitate an online social environment that is conducive to transparent marketing tactics, these sites must implement teams and strategies that are dedicated to eradicating the “bad” bots. Not only will this allow digital strategists to make better decisions, but consumers will also have the opportunity to make decisions free of bots with negative intent.
