Fake news spreads more quickly and widely than authentic news across all topics, with the effect amplified when it comes to political issues. Social media platforms have provided an ideal environment for the spread of misinformation to social media users. Computer bots are one of the digital tools used to help spread and boost fake news to social media users.
What Are Automated Bots?
Social media bots are automated programs that are mainly used to interact with users on social media to change their behavior. On social media, there are many different types of bots; some are malicious, while others are not. As many businesses use bots to assist with customer services, others use them to spread misinformation online. Bots are typically used to automate specific tasks, without specific human instructions. However, there is a misconception that all bots spam or spread viruses. There are millions of bots among billions of people who use social media platforms.
How Ubiquitous Are Social Media Bots?
According to a study published in Communications of the ACM, social media platforms such as Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and others are becoming the home of millions of social media bots that spread misinformation. According to estimates from 2017, there were 23 million bots on Twitter (around 8.5% of all accounts), 140 million bots on Facebook (up to 5.5% of accounts), and around 27 million bots on Instagram (8.2% of the accounts).
Another study found that between 9 to 15% of active Twitter accounts are automated. Based on data from 2019, Facebook disabled 6.5 billion fake accounts. According to research from Ghost Data, Instagram could have up to 95 million bots.
How Do Bots Boost Fake News?
Bots circulate misinformation in many ways. Bots tweet false information and use it to comment on or respond to real social media users. These strategies are effective because the majority of social media users do not question or verify what they read on their feed. As they pretend to be real users, bots have been observed tweeting a lot of content in a very short time.
What False Stories Do Bad Bots Circulate?
During the COVID-19 media coverage, there was an ‘infodemic’ on social media platforms due to the spread of contradictory information from various sources. Social media feeds are still circulating misinformation about COVID-19. Bots appear to be promoting many of these posts. A study revealed that when a set of known bots were analyzed, up to 66% of known bots were found to be discussing COVID-19. The spread of misinformation about COVID-19 by bots and real social media users had an impact on the pandemic.
Climate change is another issue that has been affected by bot-spamming. A recent study from Brown University in the United States revealed that a quarter of tweets about climate change were likely posted by bots. The majority of these bots were created to promote denial of climate change, as 38% of tweets that discussed fake science were found to have been tweeted by bots.
How Do I Spot a Fake News Bot?
Despite the fact that social media bots may be undetectable, there are a few signs to look for when you come across a suspicious post.
Verify their authenticity by reviewing their profile. Make sure the bio on the profile does not have any typos. Is there a profile photo on the profile? If the profile was recently created without followers, it is possible that the account was created to promote other users’ content. Always remember that you can conduct a Google reverse image search or TinEye on any profile photo you find suspicious.
How often do they tweet, post, or comment? The number of posts in a short period of time may indicate that the account is automated. If the account frequently retweets content that sparks public outrage or misinformation, that account is probably a bot.
What topics do they discuss? Using the same hashtag and discussing the hashtag’s topics and issues for days on end also indicates that the account is automated.
How Can We Prevent Bots from Spreading Misinformation?
Indiana University Bloomington researchers suggested that social bot curbing may be a successful strategy for reducing the spread of online misinformation. Academic researchers and social media platforms may collaborate to combat automated programmed bots.
Misbar’s Sources:
BBC
Imperial College London
J Med Internet Res
CITS
The Indian Express
Young Scot
arXiv Vanity
Communication of the ACM
AAAI Publications
Norton
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