Bots that fluff: danah boyd on bot-hating and Twitter

Some Twitter users have hundreds of thousands of followers. Wow, they must be really important celebrities. Or maybe they have interesting and influential ideas. Or maybe they’ve just paid for a few thousand follow bots to puff themselves up. Isn’t that . . . cheating? Not according to technology researcher danah boyd, and she explains why not in this February 2018 essay on the blog NewCo Shift.

Read it here: boyd, “The reality of Twitter puffery. Or why does everyone now hate bots?”

 

1. According to boyd, bots aren’t really a problem on Twitter, at least not in terms of puffing up follower counts or facilitating certain automated functions. In addition to her metaphor about makeup, what other examples and evidence does boyd cite in defense of bots? Which example do you find most persuasive? Why?
2. In explaining the use of bots as a way to inflate follower count, boyd draws an extended metaphor between buying bots and wearing makeup. Both practices may help users get “dolled up” to enhance their image. What other similarities does the metaphor highlight? Is the metaphor persuasive? Why or why not?
3. Many of boyd’s They Say moves are presented as hyperlinks. How well does she distinguish her own words and ideas from those of her They Say sources? Review the moves in Chapter 1 of your text to help you evaluate what boyd is doing. Explain your conclusions, and identify specific examples in the article to illustrate your points.
4.  Read (or re-read) Arielle Pardes’s article on chatbots that you’ll find on the They Say I Blog page. Both Pardes and boyd write about bots, and both view them favorably, but they’re writing in very different ways about very different types of bots. Or are they? How similar are the attitudes of the two authors? What might each one say about the bots that are highlighted by the other author? Why do you think so? Write an essay addressing these questions, and point to specific passages to support your conclusion.

Comments

[Jade]

The most persuasive example I found in the blog is that the ‘fakesters become the influencers’. The more bots they have on any website the more they will grab the attention of those who are regular people. This blog shows that when a website has a lot of bots, they attract more people. The more people they attract the more they need to keep the bots on that website to keep those people to use their site. If they remove those bots from a website, they will lose the ‘real’ people that they are trying to keep on their site.
Some other similarities that are highlighted are when it is said that they can be happy chatting with their friends with no makeup on, meaning that the bots would feel that they wouldn’t have to try to impress anyone because they would be ‘friends’. I think that it would depend on the recipient of this message if it was taken as a persuasive metaphor. I think that this metaphor is persuasive because for a bot to want to take to someone they will want to impress that person, so they will in this case ‘wear their makeup’. Making that when they get comfortable they will start to take off their makeup.
Boyd does a good job in making sure her ideas and words are worded differently than the They Say words and ideas. Some examples of this are, “Over the last year, sentiment towards Twitter’s bots has become decidedly negative.” This statement is clearly from one of the They Say sources, while the statement, “I’ve never been one to feel the need to put on a lot of makeup in order to leave the house and I haven’t been someone who felt the need to buy nots to appear cool online” is clearly from the author of this blog. Therefore, she does a good job of separating her ideas and words from the They Say ideas and words.
I think that both authors have similar thoughts on their blogs about bots and chatbots. At the same time, I think they could be talking about the same thing. The authors have very similar attitudes towards these bots and chatbots. Both the authors make the comments about how the bots and chatbots are here to do good for us and to connect others together without the human connections. I think that this is interesting because like what was said in Pardes’s article about people being able to open up to chatbots more than humans is similar to what Boyd’s blog saying that when websites get rid of the bots they lost humans as well as the bots. When the bots are taken away from websites, that takes people away from those sites as well because they feel they do not have anyone to connect to anymore due to the fact they have issues expressing themselves to others while they can do so with the bots. In conclusion, both of these authors have very good points and what to have the best interest of those in use of the bots or chatbots.

[Eric Lynum Jr.]

She says that numbers people throw around are "crap". and that its what's best for media and agencies who use bots to increase their presence. The metaphor about Bots and make up also highlights how people are drawn to an attractive face or high follower count and they think they are influence. The metaphor is very persuasive because it brings more attention and more realistic view about bots

[DK]

According to Boyd, Fakesters have the most influence, the more bots they have the more they can reach out to people. Boyd compares bots to makeup, sometimes people wear makeup to impress people and bots are similar as they follow people in the same interest to impress. A real person would just follow another real person, as a bot will just follow anyone. An example to kill off bots that facebook used is a real-name policy, where now you can’t really use a fake name but people still find ways around it. I think that the most persuasive example is facebook is such a large company and they still can’t stop bots, it just shows how powerful they are.

[Zachary S.]

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