The Political Economy of Bots: Theory and Method in the Study of Social Automation

Abstract

Automated bots play a massive role in many online environments. The security firm Incapsula estimates that over 55 percent of Internet traffic is created by these automated computer programs. Social bots are iterations of this technology that move beyond scraping the Internet for data and toward active communication with human users. These programs generally function on social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter , Telegram, and Reddit. Political actors—politicians, lobbyists, militaries, and hacktivists—are increasingly using politicized social bots (or “political bots ”), in attempts to manipulate the opinions of people online. These bots are built to mimic real users and computationally enhance the ability to deploy propaganda. What can the history of bots tell us about the power dynamics that exist between those who build and release social bots and other users active on social networking services? What can traditional political communication theory teach us about social bots ? How do new forms of agency in political communication complicate those traditional theories? How might qualitative research methods help researchers to study and understand social bots as a new, and fundamentally technical, political actor? This chapter analyzes a diverse range of literature in order to explore and address these questions. The aim is to (1) identify how uses of social bot technology interact with ideas related to communication, power , and structures of agency and (2) explain how qualitative methods and historical context can help us to understand the phenomenon of the political bot.