Malicious uses of social media bots will rise

Significance

In particular, bots are used to increase the speed and scale of misinformation campaigns and foreign propaganda. They make attribution of such activities to specific actors harder, while disorientating users and degrading public debate. With advances in text-generation methods and deepfake technologies, they are also becoming more human-like, making users more susceptible to manipulation.

Impacts

• Artificial amplification of political messages via bots will remain a major problem, although its actual impact is difficult to measure.
• Legislative reform to ensure tighter content regulation would curb malicious bot activity on social media.
• Current foreign influencer campaigns rely on human-controlled accounts on social media.