To ask about bots

[Annabella92]

AIBU to ask what you all know about bots?!

I hear about it so often now, that all online spaces are full of bots and soon it'll be almost entirely bots (well, I assume I'll still be here and I'm a human)

Same for X and YouTube comments and Reddit...

I've heard people mention is on Mumsnet too. How do they know?! I always assume there's a human on the other side. What if Mumsnet is just you, me, and a handful of others in a sea of AI generated content? How can we tell? And if we can't tell, does it matter?

A bot in this sense is a program or script designed to post videos or comments on a social media platform to raise engagement, they often steal other peoples work or generate it artificially and contain simple errors a human would have picked up on (spellings, pronounciations, basic fact checking)

they'll often post links to direct people to a website or channel to increase the subscriber count of whoever is running the bot because more subscribers means more ad revenue.

they're a cancer and one of the main reasons you're seeing so much of the same garbage in your feeds.

I don't actually use much social media. A little reddit, Mumsnet, Discord, Signal and Telegram (that sounds like a lot but really I'm just subscribed to broadcast channels)

I see very few comments with links. I hear that Russian bot farms influence elections and so on. But are they really that sophisticated? Am I really so duped in believing that 99% of Mumsnet posters are real

It’s not just that that annoys me it’s live chats with bots when I have a consumer issue or question….

I think the whole system is very sophisticated. I know you didn't trust my Guardian link but there are 100's of different studies on how disinformation and fake news is produced and disseminated by a small number of accounts at first. Then bots make multiple repetitive comments to give the content further engagement.

I have no idea if there are bots here. But there is false content, by posters who are not what they seem. Who must be at least paid to do so. During the recent elections in Ireland there was number of new accounts starting posting all about how they were going to vote for a small political party here. Post after post about how this political party were the answer to everything and how a large silent group in Ireland were going to vote for them. (They got 2% of the vote)

This is article is about the US election.

https://www.nbcnews.com/specials/russian-disinformation-2024-election-storm-1516/index.html