What Should We Do About Political Automation? Challenges for Policy and Research

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Abstract

Amidst widespread reports of digital influence operations during major elections, policymakers, scholars, and journalists have become increasingly interested in the political impact of social media “bots.” Most recently, social media companies like Facebook and Twitter have been summoned to testify about bots as part of investigations into digitally-enabled foreign manipulation during the 2016 US Presidential election. Facing mounting pressure from both the public and from legislators, these companies have been instructed to crack down on apparently malicious bot accounts. But as this article demonstrates, since the earliest writings on bots in the 1990s, there has been substantial confusion as to exactly what a “bot” is and what exactly a bot does. We argue that (1) this categorical ambiguity is responsible for much of the complexity underlying contemporary bot-related policy, that (2) ambiguities in defining bots pose serious issues for both under- and over-regulation, and that (3) before successful policy interventions can be formulated, more coherent definitions of bots need to be formulated. In this article, we outline the main challenges for both researchers and legislators working on bots, and we provide guidelines for policymakers to better categorize bots and unpack the social impact that policy can have in this increasingly important domain.

Authors

• Robert Gorwa, University of Oxford

• Douglas Richard Guilbeault, The Annenberg School for Communication at the U of Pennsylvania