Are they all that bad?
Chetan Natesh
20 replies
Everyone know that there is a lot of activity in social media that is bot activity and many people want them gone.
But are they really that bad, what do you think?
1) Bot activity MUST be completely eliminated
2) If a bot account could be easily identifiable, then fine.
3) The current situation is also fine, no big deal.
Replies
Michael Flux@michaelflux
Fundamentally the issue is even bigger than "bots". Like it doesn't matter if a bot is posting something, or if it's a sweatshop of 400 people in Bangladesh who are pasting the same few comments over and over.
The bigger issue at that is what the "bots" are used for - which is, at best, scams. But at worst and closer to reality, majority are used for manipulation of public opinion for political purposes.
For example it doesn't matter if some bot is say collecting random tweets on a subject and retweeting them to people who have explicitly subscribe to that account.
However if I'm a politician about to vote on some law and I'm completely overwhelmed with thousands of accounts tweeting at/emailing me to get me to cast my vote in a specific way, suddenly we get into it being blatant social manipulation - which is unfortunately where majority of the "bot" problem exists.
Share
@michaelflux Completely agree with this. When perspectives are given undue importance became of bot activity arround those perspectives, they will assume a position in people's minds that is not supposed to taken. Literally a threat to democracy 😶
@chetan_natesh Unfortunately can't even get people to agree on what is a "threat to democracy" as for every group of partisans the phrase has become synonymous with "threat to *our* democracy where only our group should dictate the laws".
Difficult issue to solve ...
@michaelflux That would be an insult to the sun, there are far easier ways.
Rozmer remember the name 😎
Some bots are useful, as long as they are identified as bots.
I'm subscribed to a bot that simply retweets everything with the #nocode tag. Anything besides this use case should be eliminated.
@sergey_kornilov1 You definitely have a good point. I subscribe to bot accounts that just tweet quotes from specific books. I believe those are okay.
@shivam_thiagarajan @sergey_kornilov1
I completely get your point, yes, bots help in automating a lot of mundane tasks.
But they also help in fast spread of bad quality information as well. You have set good rules for the bots to follow but what about bots that don't have well defined rules to follow, then is the harm done to the information ecosystem worth it?
I don't like when I'm struck with a bot in a conversation and can't move forward. Having a bot identified as bot is not the issue, however giving a perception that a bot is a contact or human is entirely inappropriate.
@satish_kumar_veluri So you mean to say if bots share, like or retweet content that is fine, but online CONVERSATION must strictly happen between 2 people only, right?
I completely agree with this 🙌
@chetan_natesh There are lot of things which I don't agree with, just mentioned the one I don't like the most. 😂
The 1st one definitely.
@ajay_goyal1 May please know any reasons?
@chetan_natesh Because excessive bot activities can bring your website or business or performance down. Natural thing will always be natural.