Political Propagation of Social Botnets: Policy Consequences

The 2016 US election was a watershed event where an electoral intervention by an adversarial state made extensive use of networks of software robots and data driven communications which transformed the interference into a goal driven functionality of man-machine collaboration. Reviewing the debates post the debacle, we reflect upon the policy consequences of the use of Social Botnets and understand the impact of their adversarial operation in terms of catalysing institutional decay, growing infrastructural anxieties, increased industry regulations, more vulnerable Individuals and more distorted ideas, and most importantly, the emergence of an unintended constituency in form of the bot agency itself. The article first briefly introduces the nature and evolution of Social Botnets, and then moves over to discussing the policy consequences. For future work, it is important to understand the agency and collective properties of these software robots, in order to design the institutional and socio-technical mechanisms which mitigate the risk of adversarial social engineering using these bots from interfering into democratic processes.