Читать книгу Bots - Nick Monaco - Страница 23

As we saw in the previous discussion of 1990s bots, automated agents are also extremely useful for collecting and organizing large bodies of data and information. For example, during the 2014 mayoral race in the Taiwanese city of Taipei, bots enabled data analytics companies to gather real-time data on voter preferences and reactions to candidates’ campaign messages (Liu, 2019; Monaco, 2017). These infrastructural, non-social bots, which often operate quietly in the background, passively surfing websites and gathering information, make up the bulk of bot activity online. When several cybersecurity firms recently reported that bot traffic exceeds human traffic on the web (Imperva, 2020; LaFrance, 2017), they did not mean social troll bots intended to sow political chaos on Twitter. As we have seen, there are many types of bots. When reading reports like these, readers must play close attention to the context in which the word “bot” is used: in these reports, “bot” mainly meant crawlers and spiders, which “are an infrastructural element of search engines and other features of the modern World Wide Web that do not directly interact with users on a social platform, and are therefore considerably different than automated social media accounts” (Gorwa & Guilbeault, 2018).