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What are bots and how are they used to plant misinformation on social media?

ended 10. December 2025

A Metro journalist is looking for an expert to explain what bots are? and how they are used to spread misinformation and conspiracy theories on social media? This is in response to a Rolling Stone investigation detailing how a Taylor Swift conspiracy was deliberately planted online.

https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-news/taylor-swifts-social-media-campaign-life-of-a-showgirl-1235480646/

Can you give clear responses to both questions, thanks.
 

3 responses from the Newspage community

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Editor
Mitali Deypurkaystha
AI Governance Strategist & CMO at AISensa
Bots are essentially digital actors on an empty stage, programmed by those who have ulterior motives to look and sound like real people. They move faster than any human cast ever could, posting, liking and sharing in choreographed waves that create the illusion of a crowd. When deployed in large networks, they behave like echo chambers with a life of their own, bouncing the same rumour around until algorithms mistake the noise for genuine public interest. That’s how misinformation travels: not as an organic conversation, but as a manufactured storm whipped up by machines.

This is what happens when we treat the internet as our main living space and not just a tool. The more time we spend living in digital spaces, rather than rooted in offline relationships, the easier it becomes for these synthetic voices to shape what we think we’re seeing. When we live more through screens than through human connection, we become far more vulnerable to being steered by shadows rather than people.
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Colette Mason
AI Ethics Consultant at Clever Clogs AI
Social media bots are automated accounts that masquerade as real people but operate through software programmes designed to post, like, share, and comment at scale. Think of them as digital puppets. They look like your mate Sarah from Derby in their profile picture, but there's no actual human behind the keyboard. The sophisticated ones don't just spam the same message repeatedly. They've got stolen profile photos, convincing bio details, and they'll space out their activity to mimic human behaviour patterns. Some even engage in seemingly normal conversations before dropping their real payload: the misinformation they were built to spread.

Stage 1: Strategic Seeding.  Planting inflammatory content in fringe spaces where outrageous claims get less scrutiny
Stage 2: Bots Spread Posts
Stage 3: Human Outrage Spread: Genuine users debunk claims inadvertently feeding algorithm
Stage 4: Reality Distortion: Authentic engagement gives false narratives life, "credibility" and wider spread.
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Rohit Parmar-Mistry
Founder at Pattrn Data
We need to stop imagining bots as some form of sophisticated, Skynet-style super-intelligence. In reality, they are just basic software scripts, think of them more like mass-produced 'battle droids' from a sci-fi movie. Individually, they are rudimentary, clumsy, and incapable of independent thought, simply mimicking human behaviour at a speed and scale no actual person could match.

Their power lies in how they are deployed: not with precision, but with brute force. Handlers use these swarms to create a digital 'fog of war,' flooding social media with thousands of identical lies to befuddle those ill-equipped to verify facts. By generating massive volumes of fake engagement, they trick platform algorithms into thinking a fringe conspiracy is a trending topic, forcing it into the feeds of real users. The goal isn't to win a debate with intelligence; it is to drown out the truth with noise, leaving everyday people arguing with a spreadsheet.