A bot – the word is derived from robot –is an automated computer program that can carry out repetitive tasks on its own. In recent years, the “social bots” that are used on social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter have made headlines. Taking the form of human actors and disguised behind fake profiles, social bots are programmed to respond automatically to particular keywords by liking, commenting on and sharing posts or even publishing content themselves. They are increasingly being used as part of election campaigns and to spread misinformation. “Chat bots”, meanwhile, are designed to communicate interactively with users by means of a text-based dialogue system, and search engine bots, or “web crawlers”, automatically trawl the internet looking for websites that they can then index and make findable via the Google search function. Bots thus encroach significantly on our everyday lives and play a major part in how information circulates online.

See also: The Bots