I just read an article from the New York Times about bots. You can read it here. You may be asking yourself the question “What are bots?” or “What about bots?” Well, in this article, the bots that are referred to are the online bots. This meaning, those that you may have befriend on Facebook, Twitter etc…
Turns out, you can buy friends and influence! Can you believe it? Like in the Generation Like video we watched, the power of likes, re-tweets, follows etc… are all a form of currency in this generation. The amount that you get can mean multiple things such as popularity, attention and power. It makes me wonder if all these popular pages on Facebook, or Twitter accounts with millions of followers are actually mainly composed of these bots.
This article touches on how you can buy these followers, the popularity of even the power to sway others. These online bots are disguised as real humans. They camouflage themselves into our social media and act as humans do – posts realistic updates, responses etc… Quite scary if you ask me. It’s said that different people use bots, and that they’re not illegal, it being illegal only depends on how you decide to use these bots. Politicians use them, celebrities, heck maybe some of your more popular friends on social media are using them! Really, how many followers can one person really have?! (kidding, if you’re super popular!)
Bots can be bought, made by programs which you can purchase, but can also be made from scratch. How you use them is up to you. My questions are, would you pay for bots? If you would for what reason? Is this something we should worry about? or just accept that it’s become part of this generation, like how likes and re-tweets are.
Interesting topic! As in the video Generation Like, it was all about popularity and attention that drives people to want for more likes from others. I think that as more and more people know about bots, they will probably pay to get likes. However, if bots really get popular and everyone is using it, there is no value of getting likes anymore. At the end of the day, those social media that do not allow bots will probably be the winner.
This is something that is really funny as it is creepy. I personally would never pay for bots or anything of that manner because likes and followers aren’t something that I personally care about. I don’t think that this is something we should worry too much about but maybe more of feel sad about. It’s sad to think that something like this is a popular way of going about social media because it just creates this self replenishing need for people to get likes or followers. What I mean is, if a person gets bots to follow them or like them then they will seem super popular and other people may want to be just like them and will also attempt to get more likes and in doing so, they may also turn to bots and so on and so on.