![]() Howard and colleagues at the Oxford Internet Institute in England published a working paper last month examining the influence of these social media bots on politics in nine countries. Human puppet-masters manage them, just like the Wizard of Oz, but with a wide variety of commercial aims and political repercussions. In his academic writing, Howard calls bots “highly automated accounts.” By default, the accounts publish messages on Twitter, Facebook, or other social media sites at rates even a teenager couldn’t match. “Once in a while a human will come out and say, ‘I’m not a bot,’ and then we have a conversation,” he said at the European Conference for Science Journalists in Copenhagen on June 29. It’s like a Turing test of the state of online political propaganda. ![]() Every now and then sociologist Phil Howard writes messages to social media accounts accusing them of being bots.
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