ABSTRACT
To understand ‘social bots’ by affirming the ‘social’ in social bots uncritically incorporates and integrates a bundle of problems that stem from the name of the environment in which these bots nowadays operate: social media itself is a contested term originally launched with commercial rather than an uncoded, open sociality in mind. As such, social bots may be defined as “engag[ing] in twoway, direct communication with human users through natural language” (Graeff 2014, 2), often mimicking ‘real’ users (Hingston 2012). But ‘real’ and ‘not-so real’ is a rather naïve attempt at differentiation, as the ‘real’ users of commercial social media platforms ultimately are the customers of these platforms, for example advertisement brokers and surveillance agencies. The abovementioned feature of natural language processing and production, even in its most primitive form, can be said to qualify for sociality in a basic sense, but such a starting point would inscribe bots into regimes of signification which have themselves been taken hostage by contemporary media technologies (Langlois et al. 2015). This chapter therefore tries to understand bots more from the angle of their environment and as a part and parcel of such a media technological environment. At the same time, capital’s imperative to feed on data extraction and to colonize the ephemeral uttering of ‘people’ also necessitate the situation of bots within these logics. As I will argue, bots on commercial platforms are (1) ‘natural’ inhabitants produced by the logics of the platforms and protocols themselves, and (2) a symptom of what might be called ‘algorithmic alienation,’ a process that currently redefines the very nature of knowledge production, as indicated throughout this whole book.
