Editor's note: This essay is drawn from discussions and writings around a June 2017 convening organized and led by Samuel Woolley, Research Director of the new DigIntel Lab at the Institute for the Future, alongside fellow bot experts* Renee DiResta, John Little, Jonathon Morgan, Lisa Maria Neudert, and Ben Nimmo. The symposium was held at Jigsaw , the Google / Alphabet think-tank and technology incubator. Disclosure: Jigsaw provided space, funded Woolley as a (former) research fellow, and covered travel costs.

The difference between humans and bots is that while an active human social media user might find time to post once or twice a day to hundreds of followers, bots don't need to work, look after the kids, or sleep. Bots can be programmed to have a single mission: post as much as possible without getting caught. This makes bots a powerful tool for those who wish to shape public opinion by dominating, or guiding, conversation.

One way to define bots: they are software that imitate human behavior. This can take many forms, such as chat bots that facilitate customer support or act as personal assistants. A political bot might be programmed to leave supportive comments on a politician's Facebook page, target journalists with a flood of angry tweets, or engage with a post to artificially inflate its popularity.

Despite the fervor over the political usage of bots during several recent global elections, such as last year's US elections, the term "bot," like "fake news," remains ambiguous. It's now sometimes used to refer to any social media persona producing content with which others do not agree.

Scholars have argued that nearly 50 million accounts on Twitter are actually automatically run by bot software. On Facebook, social bots—accounts run by automated software that mimic real users or work to communicate particular information streams—can be used to automate group pages and spread political advertisements. Recent public revelations from Facebook reveal that a Russian "troll farm" with close ties to the Kremlin spent around $100,000 on ads ahead of the 2016 US election and produced thousands of organic posts that spread across Facebook and Instagram. The same firm, the Internet Research Agency , has been known to make widespread use of bots in its attempts to manipulate public opinion over social media.

Nicole Mincey, however, turned out to be a real person who had indeed done work with the e-commerce operation in question.

Was this a political bot? Journalists found that the robust following behind the Mincey account was itself made up of a huge social botnet—basically a group of bots built to follow one another so as to evade the Twitter algorithm that detects problematic bot activity while also giving the illusion of legitimacy. The account also tweeted at a rate beyond the capacity of a normal human user.

Mincey, who had nearly 150,000 Twitter followers, seemed to be an African American conservative and Trump supporter. On closer inspection, however, it became clear that something wasn't quite right; most jumped to the conclusion that this was a political bot account. It turned out that Mincey's photo was taken from a stock-photo company. Further investigation revealed that the account was "a fictionalized character being used by the marketing arm of a fly-by-night e-commerce operation" selling Trump-related merchandise . The account has since been suspended.

Consider the now infamous case of Trump's August 2017 interaction with a Twitter user by the name of Nicole Mincey. Trump, in front of his (at the time) 35 million followers, thanked Mincey for tweeting that he was "working hard for the American people." (At the time of Nicole's tweet, Trump was on the golf course.)

Each can be programmed with its own unique identity; some even steal and build upon the identities of real users. Some bots are designed to fight for social good and clearly identify themselves as bots rather than pretending to be human. Covert political bots, meanwhile, are designed to do the opposite: to trick and deceive , to convincingly appear to be real people with actual political ideas. Carefully manufactured and managed identities, often shaped to mirror that of their target audience, are a hallmark of such clandestine bot campaigns.

These information operations often rely on different types of bots to execute a complex strategy. Some bots are used to unite and enhance the credibility of real users who knowingly or even unwittingly publish content that supports the operation's objectives. Other bots are used to disrupt the other side, such as posting incessantly negative comments on opposition activists' profiles. Many bots simply introduce chaos and misinformation to poison discourse. Piercing this wall of "noise" is increasingly beyond the reach of all but the most sophisticated social media users.

Some governments operate "sockpuppet" accounts at considerable scale. Take, for example, the St. Petersburg-based Internet Research Agency, which employed dozens of people at a reported cost of $2.3 million to spread its memes on Facebook, YouTube, and elsewhere. Or China's "50 Cent Army," which uses a massive number of persona accounts to flood the internet with comments meant to distract people from crises or to praise the government . The former country makes heavy use of bots in attacking opponents of the Kremlin, while the latter is known to use human labor to run shell accounts. Both types of accounts, however, commonly get referred to as bots.

The line between bot and human is sometimes blurred. Some accounts are entirely automated, spamming Twitter, Facebook, and other social media with the same messages at high volume. Others are more subtle, posting unique, carefully-crafted messages, and even interacting with other users on their social media platform of choice. These more nuanced accounts are known as personas, cyborgs , or sockpuppets. They aren't necessarily fully automated, but are nonetheless "fake" people operated by an individual or group who want to mask their true identity.

Fully automated or not, relatable human identities, coupled with superhuman posting abilities, are the key to the success of political bots. At a glance, they look like normal social media users, and most users are fooled because most people don't have time to scrutinize bot identities. Neither do most users, nor even researchers, understand the ways that huge numbers of bots might affect trends or news content—including those associated with US politics—on Twitter, Facebook, or Google.

The most effective networks of bots manipulating public discussion on social media operate a combination of automated and cyborg accounts. Bots in a network, or botnet, deploy different but complementary tactics toward achieving their goal:

Trump, in front of his tens of millions of Twitter followers, thanked Mincey for tweeting that he was "working hard for the American people." (Trump was golfing at the time of Mincey's tweet.)

Once the content had been posted to Twitter, it was quickly amplified by high-follower accounts like @DisobedientMedia and @JackPosobiec, who, with over 230,000 followers, function as what the researchers call "signal boosters." Ben Nimmo, information defense fellow at the Atlantic Council (and a co-author on this article), has outlined the same roles broadly as shepherds and obedient sheepdogs .

Data for Democracy researchers Kris Shaffer, Ben Starling, and C.E. Carey noted this phenomenon after French president Emmanuel Macron's campaign emails were hacked just days before the French elections. A group of users organized in the "/pol" channel in the anonymous internet community 4chan. Shaffer, Starling, and Carey tracked how these catalyst users designed a campaign intended to disseminate the hacked Macron campaign data to a more mainstream audience on Twitter.

In the most successful bot-aided campaigns, real social media users are influenced to the point they willingly participate in sharing false or inflammatory content with their networks. This often leads to mainstream media coverage, which further elevates the campaign even when the coverage is intended to debunk false or misleading information.

And it's still not clear how public opinion on candidates or divisive policy issues has the potential to alter public opinion. When thousands, or tens of thousands of sockpuppet and automated accounts are operated by a single user or group, they can create the impression that many thousands of people believe the same thing. In the same way that mass media like television and radio were once used to manufacture consent , bots can be used to manufacture social consensus .

However they are labeled, these roles are consistent from campaign to campaign: someone crafts a message and strategy, and automated accounts and fake personae are used to make it trend. Once trending, a meme easily attracts attention from more social media users until it spreads organically into the mainstream and the media. Recent research shows that bots can also be built to target particular human users who might be more likely to engage with and share a given piece of propaganda. The authors argue that automated agents can be used to target users with particular private views or network positions in order to spread, or curtail, fake news.

The Future of Bots

Even as companies like Twitter and Facebook acknowledge the bot problem, and race to remove bots from their platforms, the bots are becoming increasingly sophisticated and harder to detect.

A wave of Silicon Valley startups, along with established tech giants like Amazon and Google, are clamoring to produce "conversational agents" (aka chat bots), that can have a believable conversation with a human. In most cases these companies have nothing to do with propaganda, and simply want to make it easier for you to chat with applications that help you book a flight, or order groceries.

Reality, at least in the digital space, will increasingly be up for grabs.

But the same technology that allows machines to understand and communicate in human language can and will be used to make social media bots even more believable. Instead of short, simple messages blasted out to whoever will listen, these bots will carry on coherent conversations with other users, with infinite patience to debate, and persuade. They can also be programmed to collect, store, and use information gleaned from these conversations in later communication.