Internet bot

Based on Wikipedia: Internet bot

More than half of all traffic on the internet isn't human. It's bots.

That statistic alone should make you pause. Every time you browse a website, scroll through social media, or make an online purchase, you're swimming in a sea where the majority of activity comes from automated software programs designed to mimic, assist, or manipulate human behavior. Some of these digital entities are helpful—the invisible workers that make search engines possible. Others are malicious—armies of fake accounts designed to sway elections, steal your information, or flood your inbox with spam.

The line between helpful and harmful has never been blurrier.

What Exactly Is a Bot?

An internet bot is simply a software program that performs automated tasks online, usually repetitive ones that would be tedious or impossible for humans to do at scale. The term "bot" is short for "robot," though these aren't the humanoid machines of science fiction. They're lines of code, running on servers around the world, endlessly executing their programmed instructions.

Think of a bot as a tireless digital worker that never sleeps, never gets bored, and never asks for a raise. It can send thousands of messages, visit millions of web pages, or make countless purchases—all in the time it takes you to finish your morning coffee.

The most common use of bots is web crawling. Search engines like Google deploy vast armies of bots called "spiders" that constantly roam the internet, visiting websites, reading their content, and cataloging everything they find. When you type a question into a search bar and get relevant results in milliseconds, you're benefiting from the work these crawler bots have already done. Without them, the modern internet would be unsearchable—a vast library with no card catalog.

The Polite Fiction of robots.txt

There's an interesting social contract in the bot world, one that reveals a lot about how the internet actually works. Most websites include a small file called robots.txt that contains rules about how bots should behave—which pages they're allowed to visit, which they should ignore, how frequently they should make requests.

Here's the catch: it's entirely voluntary.

No website can actually force a bot to read or follow these rules. A well-behaved bot, like Google's search crawler, will respect the robots.txt file. A malicious bot will simply ignore it. It's like posting a "No Trespassing" sign in your yard—it might deter polite visitors, but it won't stop someone who's determined to break in.

This voluntary system works reasonably well for legitimate purposes, but it highlights a fundamental truth about the internet: there's no universal police force, no central authority ensuring everyone plays by the rules. The digital world operates largely on good faith and self-interest.

From ELIZA to Social Manipulation

The history of bots designed to converse with humans stretches back further than most people realize. In 1966, a computer scientist named Joseph Weizenbaum at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology created a program called ELIZA. It was one of the first chatbots—a simple program that could engage in text-based conversation by recognizing patterns in what users typed and responding with scripted replies.

ELIZA was remarkably simple by today's standards. It mostly worked by rephrasing users' statements as questions, mimicking a psychotherapist's technique. If you typed "I'm feeling sad," ELIZA might respond "Why do you say you are feeling sad?" The program had no actual understanding of language or emotion—it was pure pattern matching.

Yet something remarkable happened. Users became emotionally attached to ELIZA. They confided in it. Some insisted it truly understood them, even after Weizenbaum explained exactly how the simple trick worked. This phenomenon—humans forming emotional connections with software that merely simulates understanding—would prove prophetic.

Weizenbaum himself was troubled by what he'd created. He spent much of his later career warning about the dangers of confusing artificial responses with genuine intelligence or understanding. Few listened.

The Rise of Social Bots

Fast forward to today, and the descendants of ELIZA have evolved into something far more sophisticated and far more concerning: social bots. These are automated accounts on platforms like X (formerly Twitter), Facebook, and Instagram that are designed to mimic real human users.

The best social bots don't announce themselves. They post content that looks authentic, engage in conversations, share opinions, and build follower networks—all automatically, all at scale. A single operator might control thousands of these fake accounts, creating the illusion of grassroots movements, popular consensus, or viral trends where none genuinely exist.

The implications for democracy have proven severe.

During the 2016 United States presidential election and the 2017 United Kingdom general election, researchers documented extensive bot activity on social media platforms. These automated accounts spread misinformation, amplified divisive content, and created the appearance of widespread support for particular candidates or positions.

Emilio Ferrara, a computer scientist at the University of Southern California, has studied this phenomenon extensively. He identified what he calls "The Bot Effect"—the way interactions between automated accounts and real users create vulnerabilities in our information ecosystem. The bots don't need to convince everyone of anything. They just need to muddy the waters, make truth harder to distinguish from fiction, and exploit the emotional reactions of real users.

Research by Guillory Kramer examined how emotionally volatile users are particularly susceptible to bot manipulation. When you're already angry or anxious about a political topic, a bot-generated post that confirms your fears can alter your perception of reality—making you believe certain views are more popular than they actually are, or that certain threats are more imminent than they truly exist.

The Business of Fake Engagement

Social manipulation isn't limited to politics. Bots have thoroughly infiltrated the commercial internet as well.

Consider the app stores on your smartphone. When you browse the Apple App Store or Google Play, the rankings you see—the apps marked as "popular" or "highly rated"—may be partly fabricated by bot farms. These are operations that deploy thousands of automated accounts to download apps, leave positive reviews, and inflate metrics. An app that might otherwise languish in obscurity can appear to be a breakout hit.

The same principle applies to advertising. A study by Comscore, a media measurement company, found that more than half of online advertisements served between May 2012 and February 2013 were never actually seen by human beings. Bots generated the views. Companies paid real money to advertise to software programs.

Ticket scalping has been transformed by bots as well. When popular concerts or sporting events go on sale, automated programs can navigate the purchasing process faster than any human, snatching up the best seats within seconds. Those tickets then appear on resale markets at massive markups. The bots aren't breaking any laws in most jurisdictions—they're just faster than you are.

The Helpful Bots

Not all bots are adversarial. Many serve genuinely useful purposes.

Customer service chatbots have proliferated across the internet, handling routine inquiries that would otherwise require human employees. When you visit a company's website and a chat window pops up offering assistance, there's a good chance you're talking to software, at least initially. These bots can answer common questions, process simple requests, and route complex issues to human agents.

The growth has been explosive. When Facebook's Messenger platform first allowed developers to build chatbots in 2016, thirty thousand bots were created in the first six months alone. By September 2017, that number had grown to one hundred thousand. Companies like Domino's Pizza have built chatbots that can take entire orders through Facebook Messenger, no human interaction required.

The appeal for businesses is obvious: bots work around the clock, never take sick days, and can handle unlimited simultaneous conversations. From an efficiency standpoint, they're transformative.

But there's a tension here too. When you think you're talking to a person and you're actually talking to a bot, what does that do to trust? When customer service becomes indistinguishable from automated responses, what happens to the human relationship between companies and their customers?

Malicious Bots and the Arms Race

The darker side of bot technology encompasses a vast criminal ecosystem.

Botnets are networks of compromised computers—sometimes millions of them—secretly controlled by attackers. Your own computer might be part of a botnet without your knowledge, hijacked by malware and conscripted into a digital army. These networks can be directed to overwhelm websites with traffic in what's called a Distributed Denial of Service attack, or DDoS attack for short. The target site becomes inaccessible, buried under requests from zombie machines around the world.

Spambots harvest email addresses from websites, then flood those addresses with unwanted messages. Scraper bots copy entire websites without permission, republishing content to generate advertising revenue. Registration bots sign up email addresses to countless services, flooding inboxes with confirmation messages—a technique sometimes used to distract victims while more serious attacks unfold in the background.

In online games, particularly massively multiplayer online role-playing games, bots farm for valuable resources that players would otherwise spend hours collecting. This distorts in-game economies and frustrates legitimate players who can't compete with software that operates twenty-four hours a day.

The scale is staggering. More than ninety-four percent of websites have experienced a bot attack of some kind. For any site with significant traffic, dealing with malicious bots is simply part of operating on the modern internet.

CAPTCHA and Its Discontents

The most common defense against bots is something you've almost certainly encountered: CAPTCHA. The acronym stands for Completely Automated Public Turing Test to Tell Computers and Humans Apart. It's a mouthful, but the concept is simple—present a challenge that's easy for humans but hard for software.

Early CAPTCHAs asked users to read distorted text and type what they saw. The theory was that human visual perception could handle the warped letters while computer vision could not. This worked for a while, but computer vision improved. Modern CAPTCHAs have evolved to ask users to identify objects in photographs—click on all the images containing traffic lights, select every square with a bus, find the fire hydrants.

But CAPTCHAs have never been foolproof. Advances in artificial intelligence have made image recognition increasingly accessible to bot creators. Security vulnerabilities in CAPTCHA implementations are regularly discovered. And there's an entire industry of human CAPTCHA solvers—workers in low-wage countries paid fractions of a penny to solve CAPTCHAs for bot operators. The human cost of this arms race is rarely discussed.

Specialized companies like DataDome, Akamai, and Imperva have emerged to offer sophisticated bot protection services. These firms deploy machine learning systems to distinguish human visitors from automated ones based on subtle behavioral signals—how quickly you move your mouse, your pattern of clicks, the timing of your keystrokes. It's a constant arms race, with defenders and attackers each adapting to the other's innovations.

The Philosophical Question

There's something unsettling about living in a world where you can't be sure if you're interacting with a human or a machine. Researchers have found that people react differently once they know they're talking to a bot. The conversation feels less meaningful, the interaction less worthy of effort or respect.

Min-Sun Kim, a communications researcher, has identified several concerns that arise when humans interact with social robots: worry about hurting the bot's feelings (or not being sure whether bots have feelings), uncertainty about whether messages are being understood, and confusion about the appropriate level of politeness or formality. We've developed social scripts for human interaction over thousands of years. We have no such scripts for machines that pretend to be human.

Critics of social bots argue they undermine authentic human connection. When political movements can be fabricated, when popularity can be purchased, when it becomes impossible to know if you're arguing with a person or a program, something fundamental about public discourse breaks down.

The debates over bot regulation remain unresolved. How do you legislate against software that can be run from anywhere in the world? How do you preserve free speech while preventing mass manipulation? How do you distinguish between helpful automation and harmful deception?

The Future We're Building

We created bots to make the internet more useful—to help us find information, answer questions, and automate tedious tasks. In many ways, they've succeeded brilliantly. The convenience of modern online services depends on automation that would have seemed magical a generation ago.

But we've also created something we don't fully control. The same technologies that power helpful customer service chatbots also enable disinformation campaigns. The same infrastructure that supports search engines supports criminal botnets. The efficiency that makes automation attractive also makes it dangerous when turned to malicious purposes.

The internet is now more bot than human—by traffic volume, at least. That's not likely to change. If anything, artificial intelligence advances will make bots more sophisticated, harder to detect, and more capable of mimicking human behavior. The question isn't whether bots will remain part of our digital lives. The question is whether we can maintain any meaningful distinction between authentic human activity and its automated simulacrum.

The next time you scroll through your social media feed, remember: more than half of what you're seeing might not be from people at all. The responses, the likes, the trends—some portion of it is manufactured, generated by software programs executing their programming. We've built a world where distinguishing signal from noise requires constant vigilance.

Whether that world is better or worse than what came before depends entirely on what we choose to do about it.