But bots don’t even have to be useful. “I don’t think bots need to do anything worthwhile,” said V Buckenham, founder of Cheap Bots, Done Quick!, a free tool that allows people to create automated Twitter accounts. Tens of thousands of bots have been developed using the platform, most of which Buckenham says are of no use. “It’s something fun or something creative,” they say. “It’s a form of creative expression, whether that’s something that a lot of people follow, or something that just entertains you.”
Some bots blur the line between utility and distraction. Journalist Karen K. Ho started posting reminders for people to put down their phones and stop doomscrolling Twitter at the start of the pandemic. “I had developed quite a following during the pandemic because – understandably – many people were doom scrolling for information on how to deal with the coronavirus pandemic,” she says. She did this manually, typing out the messages and pressing send, until she started to find it exhausting to do so – especially late at night, when people were probably browsing Twitter aimlessly.
So she built a bot to do the work for her. @doomscroll_bot now tweet every hour reminding people to log out, sit next to better and not too lanky. It is followed by nearly 90,000 people.
“I see bots as a kind of medium, or a tool of the Internet,” says Ho. And Ho believes that such harmless, useful bots are not necessarily conducive to success. “What I do with my bot doesn’t feed capitalism,” she says. “People can make money with disinformation bots. That’s why they exist.”
Part of the problem, Buckenham says, is that the term “bone” has an elastic meaning. A 2021 academic paper shows that using three different methods to define inauthentic behavior on Twitter results in three completely different estimates of the proportion of users. Buckenham says people point to new Twitter users, who often have a string of numbers automatically in their usernames, as if state-sponsored. “It’s a filter bubble thing,” Buckenham says. “Different people use Twitter in completely different ways. You may only see people who tweet in the same way as you, so if you come across people who use the service in a different way, you assume they are fake or illegal.” What a person sees as a Russian-sponsored bot designed to screw up misinformation could in fact be a Central American mom who doesn’t bother changing her username from the default option given to her when she signed up.
Buckenham believes the shift from bots as a neutral word to a loaded word happened in 2016, when bots became the bogeyman who supposedly won the US presidential election. It marked a change from the designation of bots as something that corners of the internet like Weird Twitter would use, to a tool of disinformation designed to sow chaos and, over time, polarize society.
Such polarization has permeated Musk’s approach to Twitter bots, which have been presented as the enemy of a harmonious platform. That’s not the case, Buckenham says. “They add serendipity and beauty to the timeline,” they say, pointing to bots like BoschBot, dutifully posting small sections of Hieronymus Bosch paintings every few minutes. Buckenham himself made a similar bot, @softlandscapes, which generated pastel-colored landscapes every six hours. It is one of their most popular bots. “It’s mainly there because you follow it, and in between all the doom and gloom and terrible things that happen on Twitter, you see a beautiful, calming landscape,” they say. “It takes you outside and distracts you from all the stressful things in everyday life.”
