The word bot is derived from robot and refers to an internet bot. Essentially, it is a computer programme that serves as an agent for a user or any other programme or it simulates human activity.

Bots are known to perform certain tasks automatically without specific instructions from the human beings. Most of these tasks are repetitive. Bots do them fast. On the whole bots are useful, but there bad bots too who introduce malware in our system.

Bots communicate among themselves, using instant messaging or internet relay chat.

Bots, being software, are based on algorithms which assist them to carry out assigned tasks, say conversing with a human being or gathering content from other websites. Bots which converse and interact with humans are called chatbots.

Rule-based bots ask the individual to select pre-defined prompts. An independently intelligent chatbot uses ML to learn from human inputs and scans key words to trigger interaction. AI-assisted chatbots are a combination of rule-based bots and independent intelligent bots. They also use pattern matching , natural language processing (NLP) and natural language generation tools.

Spam Bots

These bots are fake accounts or inauthentic accounts on social media. Some of these are automated and some are operated by human beings. social media get rid of these everyday. Twitter removes over a million spam accounts everyday. It locks millions of suspected spam accounts. Instagram too has announced bots policy in 2020. There is rigorous verification and stricter monitoring.

To be transparent, Twitter asks them to be labelled as bots. These accounts are useful to gather relevant information, say a stock quote.

Types of Bots

Apart from chatbots and spam bots, there are social bots or opinion bots ,shopbots, knowbots to collect knowledge, spiders and crawlers to access websites and gather content for indexes in search engines, web scraping scrawlers, monitoring bots and transactional bots.

Bot Management

Bot management software helps organisation to manage the bots, and protect against malicious bots. It allows us to select some bots and block some other bots. Suspect bot traffic is driven away. There is IP rate limiting which restricts the number of same address requests. There are CAPTCHAS to distinguish between bots and humans.

Bots and Influencer Marketing

Influencer marketing is affected by bots and fake accounts. The issue is whether the influencer has the real followers or bots as followers. It is difficult to determine this, but there are tools like Upfluence, Neontools, Social Blade and Not Just Analytics which help to understand the relationship between an influencer and the audience.

There are impersonator accounts. Most of these accounts mimic real-life influencers. It is difficult to identify them.

There is a way to identify an expert from frauds — look for a blue tick that comes after verification. It makes us avoid impersonators.

Bots for Nefarious Purposes

Bots have been used for nefarious purposes, e.g. Russians spam as Americans in 2016 Presidential Election in the US to divide the voters. They also try to persuade people to send cryptos to online wallets for winning prizes where none exist. Span bots are used to attack celebrities and public persona to create hostile and toxic environment.

Uses

Bots are used as customer service agents. They are used in messanger apps. They are used to search music tracks and scheduling. They survey customer experience.

Malicious bots are used for denial-of-service by burdening servers. Spam bots are used to post promotional content. They do hacking by distributing malware.