Individual Submission Summary
Share...

Direct link:

Bots and Their Creators

Sun, May 28, 15:30 to 16:45, Hilton San Diego Bayfront, Floor: 3, Aqua 309

Abstract

Bots - particularly those with public functions such as government transparency - are often created and recreated collaboratively by communities of technologists who share a particular world view of democracy and of technology’s role in politics and social change. This paper will focus on the origins of bots in the motivations and practices of their creators focusing on a particular case of transparency bots. Wikipedia/Twitter bots are built to tweet every time an editor within a particular government IP range edits Wikipedia as a way of notifying others to check possible government attempts to manipulate facts on the platform. The outputs of Wikipedia/Twitter bots have been employed by journalists as sources in stories about governments manipulating information (Ford et al, 2016).

Investigating the relationship between bot creators and their bots in Canada and South Africa by following the bots and their networks using mixed methods, I ask: To what extent is transparency an affordance of the particular technology being employed? Or is transparency rather an affordance of the conditions in place between actors in the network? Building from theories of co-production (Jasanoff, 2004) and comparing the impact of Wikipedia/Twitter bots on the news media in Canada and South Africa, this paper begins to map out the relationships that seem to be required for bots to take on a particular function (such as government transparency). Findings indicate that bots can only become transparency bots through the enrolling of allies (Callon, 1986) and through particular local conditions that ensure success in achieving a particular outcome. This is a stark reminder of the connectedness of human-machine relations and the limitations on technologists to fully create the world they imagine when they build their bots.

Author