Social Media Bots: Definition and Disadvantages
Social media bots are automated software available on social media channels used for performing specific actions and purposes. Some social bots are partially automated, but most of them are designed to function automatically. Both moral and immoral people make these social media bots and most of the immoral bots are made in such a way to ape human behavior. Though some good bots can help social media, the bad ones are frequently used for tricking people.
According to many reports and researches, suspicious bots create a big percentage of all social media accounts. You might see a profile that appears just like a usual account, but it could be a harmful social media bot.
While most social media bots are considered immoral, there are good bots used for beneficial services like providing weather updates, sports scores, etc. The good bots are transparent, which means you can easily recognize them as a bot; on the other hand, the immoral bots are designed to look disguise as a human.
These harmful social media bots can be fatal, so it is recommended to stay away from them since they can ruin your posts, account content, and cause more harm. Let’s study the flaws of these bad social media bots.
The Cons of Social Media Bots
1. Artificially Increasing Popularity of a Brand or Person
When a social media account possesses thousands or millions of followers, it can easily stand out from the crowd. This makes people perceive an account as important or famous. The most obvious intention of using social media bots by an immoral person is to become more popular or influential on the network. These bots can magically boost the followers of an account, likes, and even comments on a post. These social media bots are purchased and sold in the black market, which is alone a criminal offense.
2. Affects Financial Market
Social media bots have the potential to manipulate the financial market as well. For illustration, bots can spread the bad or good news about a company or brand to control the prices of the stock. It has been seen many times in real-life events.
3. Manipulate Elections
The social media bots are likely to influence the elections significantly on social media networks. This happens because these bots are capable of populating social media with the political discussions that can lead to either popularity of a political group or may even spread a negative message about a group
4. Spam Comments
Most bad social bots are capable of posting spam comments on the users’ posts to divert the discussions on social media channels. It can create propaganda by spreading random comments on a targeted post. As per several reports, on social media channels, almost 5.5 % of comments were posted from the automated accounts controlled by immoral bots.
5. Fake Video Impressions
These days many marketers, agencies, publishers, and content creators purchase traffic to make a brand progress rapidly. Some even use automated bots to create fake impressions on video posts to make the brand more appealing and popular. Almost 6% of video impressions on video posts are created with the help of these automated bots.
6. Phony Engagement
These automated bots are even used to create false likes, shares, and other user engagement on social media channels to make posts more approachable and important. It is a common thing that people easily trust the content that is being liked by millions of other users. These smart bots do the same to some posts in an intention to create post look more attractive.
7. Spam Tags
Automated bots have the ability to tag real users on posts without the permission of the actual users. This is used for creating propaganda or viral a product or brand on social networks. The strategy works really effectively and increases the reach of brands post. It has been seen that almost 2.25% of the total tags on social networks were generated from these fake bots.