3.1. Definition of a bot

There are several ways computer programs are involved with social media. One of them is a “bot,” a computer program that acts through a social media account.

There are other ways of programming with social media that we won’t consider a bot (and we will cover these at various points as well):

• The social media platform itself is run with computer programs, such as recommendation algorithms (chapter 12).

• Various groups want to gather data from social media, such as advertisers and scientists. This data is gathered and analyzed with computer programs, which we will not consider bots, but will cover later, such as in Chapter 8: Data Mining.

Bots, on the other hand, will do actions through social media accounts and can appear to be like any other user. The bot might be the only thing posting to the account, or human users might sometimes use a bot to post for them.

Note that sometimes people use “bots” to mean inauthentically run accounts, such as those run by actual humans, but are paid to post things like advertisements or political content. We will not consider those to be bots, since they aren’t run by a computer. Though we might consider these to be run by “human computers” who are following the instructions given to them, such as in a click farm:

Fig. 3.1 A photo that is likely from a click-farm [c1], where a human computer is paid to do actions through multiple accounts, such as like a post or rate an app. For our purposes here, we consider this a type of automation, but we are not considering this a “bot,” since it is not using (electrical) computer programming. See a more modern example here [c2].