Recruited by a person? (Image: Carl Court/Getty Images)
PUT down your megaphone and pick up your smartphone. A program nicknamed Botivist rallies people to social causes via Twitter.
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If youāre an activist, spreading your message to like-minded people can be tedious work, says Saiph Savage at West Virginia University in Morgantown. Bots can take those tasks off your plate. āYou no longer have to invest time searching for people and trying to get them to do actions for you or with you,ā she says.
In late April, Savage and her colleagues launched their automated activists into the Twittersphere. There were eight different bots, focused on one issue: corruption in Latin American governments. When Botivist spotted someone tweeting about the subject ā perhaps mentioning ā³¦“Ē°ł°ł³Ü±č³¦¾±Ć³²Ōā, a bot would send them an inspirational quote or call to action.
The researchersā goal was to see how good the different bots were at convincing people to contribute ideas about tackling corruption.
More than 1000 people were contacted by the bots and 175 replied. Of those, 81 per cent responded to the botsā call to contribute ideas, suggesting that cities get tougher on crime or become more transparent ().
Humans could then jump into the discussion with people they already knew were interested in the issue.
Savage and her team are now working on a public version of Botivist. They are also planning another run-through to see how far the bots can move people: can they convince anyone to show up to an event in the real world?
āOne of the biggest benefits of activism is that it can guide citizens to take action,ā says Savage. āThis is taking people that were complaining about corruption, now theyāre thinking about things they can do to change it.ā
āPeople complaining about corruption started thinking about the things they could do to change itā
Savage and her team are not the first to use bots for what they see as the greater good.
For example, at the University of Washington in Seattle and his colleagues created bots to tweet positive messages about vaccinations, such as links to scientific papers showing their safety.
To their surprise, some of their creations got into arguments with anti-vaccine Twitter accounts that were also run by bots.
āI think if we tried to do an inventory on the public issues that already have bots on them, weād be surprised,ā says Howard.
He agrees that bots have the potential to do good, but is wary about encouraging their use, particularly if they are pretending to be humans. āFor me itās in the same suite of political tools as negative campaigning or push polling,ā he says, referring to the marketing technique of trying to sway peopleās opinions by asking loaded questions in a fake survey.
And bots can be used by anyone. After Russia invaded Ukraine, for example, a appeared on social media, sending out pro-Kremlin messages or attacking accounts that seemed anti-Putin.
This article appeared in print under the headline āāBotivistā calls you to armsā
