The Bots Are Back In Town

I’ve been doing a lot of muting on the Twitter this morning – over eighty separate accounts, all of which tweet out short extracts from that early P.G. Wodehouse story I’ve discussed before, as well as other stuff that I can’t be bothered to look up. For the most part, that’s all they do; whereas the accounts I muted back in the autumn generally sent out images or gifs as well as text, apparently advertising things like betting sites for the World Cup, the vast majority of these just individually meaningless fragments of text (the exceptions are a sub-group that include pictures of anime girls).

On the basis of a cursory survey as I muted them, there are at least three distinct categories. There are those with no avatar, no information, not many followers – although, supposedly, they were created 8 or more years ago (can that be faked?) – that just tweet text. There are the ones that tweet anime girls as well as text, that otherwise have the same characteristics as the first group. And then there’s a bunch that look slightly more like normal accounts, with avatars (mostly NFT apes), a bit of information (frequent mention of #crypto, #nft, #C+programmer and various sports), and follower counts in the tens or scores. But they just tweet out fragments of text, so clearly aren’t real either.

It’s not trolling – I see these and get annoyed simply because I regularly search for ‘Thucydides’ and find them clogging up the results, but you would have to be searching for some pretty specific terms to encounter them normally. It’s more like a kind of pollution – the green algae bloom that rapidly takes over ponds and streams when the conditions favour it; the digital ecosystem clearly includes some mindless organisms that churn out toxic rubbish in the background, invisible unless you go looking for them. It’s not harmless; there are presumably servers out there, wasting energy in supporting this activity.

Are they a bot reserve army, ready to be summoned by ‘Boost Your Follower Count’ businesses when they need to astroturf an issue or make a dodgy research centre seem legitimate? Are they in fact micro-components of a vast collective entity, whose activity only appears mindless and directionless if you don’t have the bigger picture? Are they the digital equivalent of actinomycetes, breaking down the debris of human culture into compost? Am I the only person who’s aware of this phenomenon, and is it a harbinger of the apolocalypse?