“Bots” are now considered negative on social platforms

Calling someone a bot on social media once meant suspecting they were in fact software, but now the use of the word is evolving into an insult for known human users, researchers say.

Many efforts to detect social media bots use algorithms that attempt to identify behavioral patterns that are more typical of the traditional meaning of a bot: automated accounts controlled by a computer, but their accuracy remains questionable.

“Recent research has focused on detecting social bots, which is a problem in itself because of the ground truthing issues,” he said. Dennis Assenmacher The Leibniz Institute for Social Sciences in Cologne, Germany, said it was unclear whether the findings were accurate.

To investigate, Assenmacher and his colleagues looked at how users perceive bots: They looked at how the word “bot” was used on Twitter between 2007 and December 2022 (the social network was renamed X in 2023 after being acquired by Elon Musk), analyzing the words that appeared next to it in more than 22 million English-language tweets.

The researchers found that before 2017, the term was often used in conjunction with allegations of automated behavior, such as “software,” “scripts,” or “machines,” the kinds of things that traditionally fit the definition of a bot. Since that year, that usage has changed.

“The accusation has now become like an insult, it’s used to dehumanize people, it’s used to denigrate people’s intelligence, it’s used to deny them their right to participate in the conversation,” Assenmacher said.

The cause of this change is unclear, but Assenmacher said it may be political in nature. The researchers looked at the accounts of prominent people, such as politicians and journalists, that each Twitter user followed, and classified users as left- or right-leaning. They found that left-leaning users were more likely to accuse other users of being bots, and that those who were accused were more likely to be right-leaning.

“One possible explanation is that the media has reported that right-wing bot networks [2016] “The US elections,” Assenmacher said, “but this is just speculation and needs to be confirmed.”