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The 2020 United States presidential election was one of the most impassioned in the country’s history. President Donald Trump and his Democratic opponent Joe Biden both contended they were fighting for nothing less than the future of American democracy itself. The election brought with it several events rarely seen in the history of American democracy – an election held in the middle of a global pandemic, citizens’ storming of the US Capitol, and attempts by a sitting president to overturn the results of a free and fair election. Unprecedented events weren’t only taking place offline, however – social bots, or computer programs posing as humans on social media sites such as Twitter and Facebook, were beginning to use artificial intelligence (AI) techniques to fly under the radar of security teams at social media platforms and target voters with political messages. One of the leading bot detection experts in the US bluntly admitted,

Back in 2016, bots used simple strategies that were easy to detect. But today, there are artificial intelligence tools that produce human-like language. We are not able to detect bots that use AI, because we can’t distinguish them from human accounts. (Guglielmi, 2020)

But bots were not only carrying out covert, deceptive, activity online in 2020. Working with amplify.ai, the Biden campaign deployed a chatbot to interact with users on Facebook messenger and encourage users to vote. This bot’s intent was not to deceive – it would reveal that it was not human if asked – rather it was a means of using AI techniques to try to boost the get-out-the-vote efforts. Amplify.ai’s bots helped Biden reach over 240,000 voters in fourteen states in the three weeks leading up to election day (Dhapola, 2021; Disawar & Chang, 2021). Bots’ activities in the 2020 election illustrated the dual nature of the technology – whether bots are “bad” or “good” for society depends on how they are designed and used.

Until recently, the word “bot” was fairly obscure, used mostly in arcane discussions in the academy between scholars, and in Silicon Valley meeting rooms full of computer programmers. The year 2020 was, of course, not the first time bots had been deployed to participate hyperactively in online political discussion in the US. The November 2016 presidential election was the one that gave bots a household name, both in the US and around the world. Journalists and researchers documented the underhanded automated tactics that were being used during that contest to promote both candidates. For many, this was the first time that they realized that political discussions online might not have an actual person on the other end – it might be a piece of software feeding us canned lines from a spreadsheet on the other side of the globe. Now, we can’t seem to get that idea out of our heads. These days, social media users quickly label any antagonistic arguer on social media a “bot,” whether it’s a troll, a disinformation agent, or a true bot (an automated account).

But before bots became a notorious byword for social media manipulation in 2016, they were already a central infrastructural part of computer architecture and the internet. Many bots are benign, designed to do the monotonous work that humans do not enjoy and do not do quickly. They carry out routine maintenance tasks. They are the backbone of search engines like Google, Bing, and Yandex. They help maintain services, gather and organize vast amounts of online information, perform analytics, send reminders. They regulate chatrooms and keep them running when users are fast asleep. They power the voice-based interfaces emerging in AI assistants such as Apple’s Siri, Amazon’s Alexa, or Microsoft’s Cortana. They carry out basic customer service as stand-ins for humans online or on the phone. On the stock market, they make split-second decisions about buying and trading financial securities; they now manage over 60 percent of all investment funds (Kolakowski, 2019). In video games, they run the interactive agents known as non-player characters (NPCs) that converse with human players and advance storylines.

Other bots are malicious. They amplify disinformation and sow discord on social media, lure the lonely onto dating sites, scam unsuspecting victims, and facilitate denial-of-service cyberattacks, crashing websites by overloading them with automated traffic. They generate “deep fakes” – realistic-seeming faces of humans who have never existed, which can serve as a first step to larger fraudulent activity on the web (such as creating fake accounts to use for scams on dating apps). They artificially inflate the popularity of celebrities and politicians, as companies sell thousands of fake online followers for only a few dollars (Confessore et al., 2018).

As obedient agents following their developers’ programming, bots’ uses and “interests” are as diverse as humans themselves. They can be written in nearly any programming language. They can sleuth from website to website, looking for relevant information on a desired topic or individual. They are active on nearly all modern social media platforms – Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Reddit, Telegram, YouTube – and keep the wheels turning at other popular sites like Wikipedia. They can interact with other users as official customer service representatives, chat under the guise of a human user, or work silently in the background as digital wallflowers, watching users and websites, silently gathering information, or gaming algorithms for their own purposes.

This book is about bots in all their diversity: what they do, why they’re made, who makes them, how they’ve evolved over time, and where they are heading. Throughout these chapters, we’ll draw on research from diverse fields – including communications, computer science, linguistics, political science, and sociology – to explain the origins and workings of bots. We examine the history and development of bots in the technological and social worlds, drawing on the authors’ expertise from a decade of interviews in the field and hands-on research at the highest levels of government, academia, and the private sector.

It’s easy to think bots only emerged on the internet in the last few years, or that their activities are limited to spamming Twitter with political hashtags, but nothing could be further from the truth. Bots’ history is as long as that of modern computers themselves. They facilitate interpersonal communication, enhance political communication through getting out the vote or supercharging low-resourced activists, degrade political communication through spam and computational propaganda, streamline formulaic legal processes, and form the backbone of modern commerce and financial transactions. They also interact with one another – allowing computers to communicate with each other to keep the modern web running smoothly. Few technologies have influenced our lives as profoundly and as silently as bots. This is their story, and the story of how bots have transformed not only technology, but also society. The ways we think, speak, and interact with each other have all been transformed by bots.

Our hope is that through this book, the reader will gain a thorough understanding how technology and human communication intertwine, shaping politics, social life, and commerce. Throughout these seven chapters, we’ll cover all these areas in detail. In this chapter, we give the history of bots and define the different types of bots. In Chapter 2, Bots and Social Life, we explore the role that these computational agents play across global digital society. Chapter 3 explores the various ways that bots have been used for political communications, for both good and bad purposes, focusing especially on the advent of widespread digital campaigning and social media political bots in the last decade. In Chapter 4, we turn to the role of bots in the private sector, detailing commercial uses of automated agents over time in finance, customer service, and marketing. Chapter 5 explores the intersection of bots and artificial intelligence (AI). In Chapter 6, we trace the history of bot theory in academia – drawing on social science, philosophy, art, and computer science – to understand how the conception of bots has evolved over time and to consider bots’ future, particularly as it relates to questions in policy, ethics, and research. Finally, we close with thoughts on the future of bots, and key recommendations for researchers, policymakers, and technologists working on bots in the future.