Читать книгу Bots - Nick Monaco - Страница 25

The “cyborg” bot is a hybrid type of bot that does not fit perfectly into any of the previous categories. Cyborgs are a special form of social bot – automated accounts on social media that can be thought of as “bot-assisted human” or a “human-assisted bot” (Zi et al., 2010). However, the line between fully automated bot and cyborg bot is fuzzy, for it has “never been clear exactly how much automation makes a human user a cyborg, or how much human intervention is needed to make a bot a cyborg” (Gorwa & Guilbeault, 2018).

Since cyborgs are partially controlled by humans, they leave different, less predictable activity signatures than normal, fully automated bots. For this reason, they are often able to slip through social media companies’ cybersecurity and bot detection algorithms. In the past few years, they have become increasingly common as a tool for political messaging (Woolley, 2020a, p. 85); for example, during the 2019 US Democratic presidential primary debates, one cyborg called the YangGang RT bot retweeted mentions of candidate Andrew Yang (Monaco, 2019b). Another recent form of cyborg political activism and campaigning is the “Volunteer botnet” – the willing temporary donation of one’s social media account to be used as a bot for political campaigning (Woolley & Monaco, 2020). We’ll cover cyborgs in greater depth in our chapter on political bots.