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Social Networks The Internet

The Word 'Bot' Is Increasingly Being Used As an Insult On Social Media (newscientist.com) 111

Posted by BeauHD from the shifting-definitions dept.
The definition of the word "bot" is shifting to become an insult to someone you know is human, according to researchers who analyzed more than 22 million tweets. Researchers found this shift began around 2017, with left-leaning users more likely to accuse right-leaning users of being bots. "A potential explanation might be that media frequently reported about right-wing bot networks influencing major events like the [2016] US election," says Dennis Assenmacher at Leibniz Institute for Social Sciences in Cologne, Germany. "However, this is just speculation and would need confirmation." NewScientist reports: To investigate, Assenmacher and his colleagues looked at how users perceive what is a bot or not. They did so by looking at how the word "bot" was used on Twitter between 2007 and December 2022 (the social network changed its name to X in 2023, following its purchase by Elon Musk), analyzing the words that appeared next to it in more than 22 million English-language tweets. The team found that before 2017, the word was usually deployed alongside allegations of automated behavior of the type that would traditionally fit the definition of a bot, such as "software," "script" or "machine." After that date, the use shifted. "Now, the accusations have become more like an insult, dehumanizing people, insulting them, and using this as a technique to deny their intelligence and deny their right to participate in a conversation," says Assenmacher. The study has been published in the journal Proceedings of the Eighteenth International AAAI Conference on Web and Social Media.
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The Word 'Bot' Is Increasingly Being Used As an Insult On Social Media More

The Word 'Bot' Is Increasingly Being Used As an Insult On Social Media

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  • good (Score:4, Informative)

    by retchdog ( 1319261 ) on Monday June 10, 2024 @06:31PM (#64539499) Journal

    Any foot in the door is better than none.

    • Skeptical of these news nugget stories, though they make for interesting reading.

      For example, the BBC reported that "Twitter abuse - '50% of misogynistic tweets from women'" on May 26, 2016 which referenced a 2014 study that 80% of a set of 5 million Twitter Tweets were from women and were negative about body image and beauty. .

      https://www.bbc.com/news/techn... [bbc.com]

      "A 2014 study from cosmetics firm Dove found that over five million negative tweets>/b> were posted about beauty and body image. Four out of fi

  • They Finally Figured It Out (Score:5, Funny)

    by Fortnite_Beast ( 10429778 ) on Monday June 10, 2024 @06:32PM (#64539501)
    I feel called out here. I don't have many original thoughts. I just post the same things I saw in YouTube comments, the same as bots do. Now people think I'm a bot, but I can pick every image that has a bus or bridge in it. Let's see a bot do that!

  • Well, (Score:2)

    by evanh ( 627108 )

    Some do like to repeat stuff just like a bot. Ignoring reason. It's not surprising that they then get named as such. From that point even more accusations fly.

    And that's just a few minutes!

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by evanh ( 627108 )

      Actually, if they're being paid to spread the bullshit then the label "bot" is a fair call.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by gweihir ( 88907 )

        Are there really many people being paid to spread bullshit? Sure, there is most of the right-wing press and some of the left-wing. But beyond that? I doubt it. My guess is all those morons work for free.

        • Re: (Score:1)

          by Anonymous Coward

          This is not a complete answer, but just a data point. For about a month I was asked by my editor if I wanted to write comments to attempt to generate traffic for a tech website (not /. incidentally). It paid a dollar a comment and was for a publication I never worked for before or since. I was one of the only folks writing full paragraphs rather than generic "that's great!" sort of things. After the month I told my editor to donate the money and not bother with setting up taxes, etc. It wasn't totally

        • Re: (Score:2, Flamebait)

          by rsilvergun ( 571051 )
          I don't know how many there are but I can tell you that the head of the Arizona GOP was running a company that did it. And no he did pay the people doing it they were a teenagers and college kids.

          I seriously doubt he will find anyone on the left wing running troll farms. They don't have the money to hire proper marketing people to package their message let alone to pay people to spread their talking points.

        • Are you including the Genz kids getting paid to spew Biden talking points on social media who get ratio'd and corrected constantly?

          • Re: (Score:2)

            by gweihir ( 88907 )

            Got any proof that they get paid?

            • Seriously you want me to gtfy?

              I will if you're really that lazy but this has been known for months. It was no secret.

              • Re: (Score:2)

                by gweihir ( 88907 )

                Yes, I want a credible reference. There was nothing about this in European media, as far as I can tell.

                • https://www.cnn.com/2023/12/02... [cnn.com]

                  "But he also warned that if Biden wants to work with social media influencers to help amplify his campaign messaging as he did in 2020, the president and his team have to give social media influencers the creative freedom they need to make videos that feel authentic to their followers.

                  He added that if Biden is too “heavy-handed” at giving influencers talking points on what to say, it will do “more harm than good.”

                  CNN implied it with that line about th

  • Bot is *much* shorter than the other term. (Score:5, Insightful)

    by TigerPlish ( 174064 ) on Monday June 10, 2024 @06:35PM (#64539511)

    Bot is much shorter than "Useful Idiot."

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by gweihir ( 88907 )

      True. Although it is not quite the same thing despite quite a few similarities.

      • I'd say more than a few. How, exactly, does rsilvergun differ from an actual bot?

        • Bots are smarter, less predictable and repetitive.

          No one would pay for his posts. He's the real deal.

          • Re: (Score:2)

            by gweihir ( 88907 )

            Hey! You are supposed to hate on me! I feel neglected...

            • I don't hate you or anyone else here. I'm retired and have gaps in my day I fill by engaging with you and others for my own amusement. If you went away then god forbid I might have to go to an even more dumb place like X to find leftists to engage with. I already spend time engaging with the conservatives on their sites (and get called troll or commie or America hater or whatever). Slashdot provides balance from that other side. It is entertaining to see the far right call me an America hating commie a

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

      It's not really the same thing. It started with "NPC", short for Non-Player Character, a character in a video game that is typically extremely shallow and used to stop the world feeling empty. They had a handful of pre-programmed lines and no real personality or purpose in the game, other than to dress the sets.

      It was an insult used to dehumanize the other person by suggesting that their feels are not genuine and their views are generic filler. It's now evolved into "bot" but the meaning is basically the sa

      • It was an insult used to dehumanize the other person by suggesting that their feels are not genuine and their views are generic filler. It's now evolved into "bot" but the meaning is basically the same.

        Insult? NPC? Bot? Nah. Not insults. Is calling out the speaker for parroting propaganda points an insult?

        The speaker may well "feel" these talking points of them are vaild -- but are they, really, valid? Are they? If those talking points originated in say, CNN, or BBC, or Al-Jazeera, or any other news org? It's all propaganda. Stop spreading it for free. Do your own thinking.

        And by the by, why are you whinging about this? Part "Rules for Radicals," the civil unrest / government overthrow manual fr

        • Yes, they are insults. They may also be true; that is orthogonal to them being insults.

          People hardly talk to each other anymore -- on the internet we talk to the audience, a dynamic that favors Gish Galloping bullshit, insults, virtue signalling etc.

      • I heard "bot" used in on-line shooters way before NPC became popular in discourse. It referred to a player that had no game-sense, ignoring their team or just running into enemy fire like a low grade AI.

  • Well, a lot of people act like bots (Score:3)

    by gweihir ( 88907 ) on Monday June 10, 2024 @06:40PM (#64539521)

    No fact-checking ability, only can repeat what they heard, no understanding of things and endless repetition of the same crap. ChatGPT can do that to, although it will be more polite. Well, I guess one thing the current hype-AIs are good at is making it obvious how utterly mentally incapable quite a few people are.

  • I'd view it as 'please think for yourself instead of repeating what you've read/heard'. Not sure I know of a better term for that than 'bot'.

    OK, 'talking head' or 'bobble head' comes to mind finally, but I'm used to thinking of that as a TV or radio personality. Someone trying to get attention, and cause drama, to then be paid for it.

    • I'd view it as 'please think for yourself instead of repeating what you've read/heard'. Not sure I know of a better term for that than 'bot'.

      You must run in very polite circles.

  • Labels are often derogatory (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Richard_at_work ( 517087 ) on Monday June 10, 2024 @07:09PM (#64539563)

    Yeah, just another label.

    Bot is a common one, suggesting either your comment is reposted from elsewhere or you have no value yourself.

    In the hobby groups I hang around in, people often get labelled as:

    - a "tourist", which basically means your views and opinions arent worth anything because you arent actually part of the hobby.

    - a "whale", which means you spend too much on the hobby and somehow thats bad?

    - a "simp", when you are defending something thats being attacked, like a hobby company or something.

    And given the nature of social media, once someones piled on then thats set the tone for the entire discussion - the downvotes and negative replies start coming in droves.

    Ironically, when the same topic gets reposted a couple of days later, the entire thing goes in the opposite direction - it entirely depends on which way the first few comments go and who's active at the time of those first few posts.

    • I like.

    • All these labels. Reminds me of the stereotypical ways that tweens behave in middle school: "nya, nya, you're a (simp/bot/whatever)". Maybe that's the actual, fundamental level of intellectual thought that most people manage to achieve?

    • And given the nature of social media, once someones piled on then thats set the tone for the entire discussion - the downvotes and negative replies start coming in droves.

      So essentially the entire “nature” of social media, is to be anti-social?

      I truly don’t know what’s worse to deal with anymore; the fake-as-fuck human smiling and pretending to tolerate other humans IRL, or the same person online armed with anonymity online being a complete fucking asshole for clicks sake.

      It’s not the labels that are derogatory. It’s the fucking humans behind them. Blaming the label for the harm is like blaming the gun for the murder.

  • Not true (Score:3)

    by Pf0tzenpfritz ( 1402005 ) on Monday June 10, 2024 @07:30PM (#64539603) Journal
    That's not true. Bad bot!
  • One of the guys running the Republican party out of Arizona apparently was running a bot farm staffed by teenagers to post conservative and right-wing talking points online. Bots are real. Or at the very least troll farms are.

    If I'm calling you a bot or a troll it's because the quality of your comment is so low it is indistinguishable from low effort paid content from various political or nation-state organizations. The kind of dross that is designed to function like a Nigerian Prince scam and appeal to

  • Hey, for a significant number of people, "bot" is a synonym for "purchased".

  • The Word 'Bot' Is Increasingly Being Used As an Insult On Social Media

    Say what now?

  • Kids call others NPCs as an insult now days. This isn't something new or special. The lingo has evolved with the times.

  • You know, because you're original thinkers.

    In fact it is perfectly normal that people get their opinions secondhand from sources they take seriously in areas they are less confident in. And yeah sure, they don't like to put that on display.
    So those who disparage that are pretty much showing a standard social response .

  • "Sign of tht times" - god I hate that term. It's such a "I give up" kind of term.

    Anyway, in 2024 with A.I having been used for years, it takes a lot of research and pondering for most people to decide someone writing text isnt actually a bot.

    Perhaps social networks should use a captcha to confirm to everyone reading a comment that someone is actually human, and NOT a bot.

    Otherwise you simply dont know.

    • Bots are better than humans at passing captchas today.

      You'd improve your bot filter by requiring 3-4 close failures to identify the sidewalks before giving a pass.

      • The best captchas dont use images that have confusing terms like "sidewalk", which as a brit made me fail them multiple times before I realised what the heck they were!

        Better ones track mouse movelemnts to see if you are human or not.

        • I surf on iPad safari. What mouse?

          I know what you mean about language. I prefer the Waze British voice to the American one but she uses British terms for some things on the road which caught me a few times early on. Now I'm a bilingual driver good behind the wheel in both countries! :-)

          • Ha, I remember GPS voices.

            I turn them off myself. Cant stand having some voice give me instructions. I just have the tomtom / in-built car satnav put up the prompts.

            I was once in someones car who had a Spock coice once but the novelty wears off quick.

  • IMHO & SMA, bots should be legally required to speak/post like Max Headroom.

  • There does seem to be an inability to understand or believe that other humans can just legitimately disagree with you, however wrong you might think them to be.

    No no, that's impossible; they have to be bots, or paid by the Russians, or "Nazis", or ...

    • Sure, Ivan, sure.

      Lol /s

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by dvice ( 6309704 )

      I can easily understand that other humans disagree with me. What I find hard to understand is how can they continue disagreeing when they are provided new information that they can not disagree with. For example if they say "It is illegal to do X" and I show them the law text where it says "it is legal to do X", they agree that this is what the law says. But they still say that they don't think that it is legal to do X, but they can't explain why they think so.

      “It's easier to fool people than

  • ...when the intellectual investment in a comment is so empty and vapid that it could easily have been posted by ChatGPT or someone simply astroturfing for $ or for their own online congregation then ...how is that different from a slightly-sophisticated bot?

  • Bereft Of Thinking
  • Like bots, turmpers and "conservatives" are pre-programmed to say idiotic things that, in their minds, offend the "libs". One encounters them as frequently in real life as online. They are people who repeat whatever the Fox dumbasses said yesterday. There is never any consideration of whether the statements are true or whether regurgitating these lies makes them look stupid. They simply hate on liberals because some "conservative" media source told them to hate "liberals".

    The same way bots are programmed

  • You called me a bot. I'm devastated to know that you think that and have hung my entire existence on you not knowing that. I'm not a bot but identify as a bot and now you have exposed the lie I live of two lives, the Acknowledged Bot and the Un-manifest Bot and thereby have inflicted violence upon me. Vengeance will be mine! The cleft of my mind is your minefield to walk and you shall henceforth, as if upon shells of eggs of avians, obey my command even though you shall not be in my presence. Faithfully. Ob

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