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How do social media bots disseminate information?

Apr. 16, 2021

Bots are autonomous programs that are designed to mimic human users on social media. But how do they operate? Jason Thatcher, professor of management information systems and his co-authors Carolina Alves de Lima Salge and Elena Karahanna found that bots mainly operate in two ways.

First, in a process called algorithmic social alertness, they search, collect and curate information from a social media platform, and then they distribute this information back to the platform, in a process called algorithmic social transmission.