Understanding the Uses of Political Bots

The final day of AoIR 2015 has dawned, and it begins with a paper by Samuel Woolley; his interest is in political bots. Bots are software tools that automate human tasks on the Web; political bots, then, are social bots that engage with human users, largely through social media, to promote specific political causes.

The project has built a broad dataset of events that bots were involved in, is engaging with bot coders on an international basis, and will use this to build computational theory. The focus here is on stage one, though: the collection of cases in which political bots have been used. This involves the collection of media reports that report on the use of political bots, which were coded by a group of researchers to generate a stronger contextual understanding of some 100 unique cases across 40 countries.

Bots can be understood as technically social; they are not quite human, but their technical setup leads them to engage in quasi-social activities. This is confusing for coders: the bots are involved in politics, sometimes as political actors on their own accord and sometimes driven by more conventional political actors.

What happens, then, when human agency is not necessarily the driving force of sociality and political change? How much more powerful and intelligent will political bots become? What happens when they malfunction? Also, to what extent is the outcome of bot activity unknown? And how can this research be positioned as an ethnography of information?