This week’s readings talked a lot about social bots. Many of us, myself included, probably have a negative connotation when we think about bots and the internet. For me the first thing that pops into my mind is the 2016 presidential election and how the Russians used political bots to influence the United States elections. As Jonas Haeg in “The Ethics of Political Bots: Should We Allow Them for Personal Use?” (2017) would call it, this would be malicious political bot (or polibot). Malicious polibots are “devoted to obviously malicious aims such as sharing hate-speech, false information, suppressing certain voices, etc., often with the aim or intention of maliciously steering a certain election”(Haeg 87, 2017).
Haeg talks about three kinds of polibots. There are the malicious bots, the personal bots, and the saintly bots. A personal bot is a bot that is used by a person for their own political influence. These bots can wither be saintly or malicious (Haeg 2017). To bring the discussion to the United Nations at Geneva, I believe they would use saintly polibots. The saintly polibot is a bot that is “devoted merely to sharing important, true and relevant political information, with no allegiance to particular issues or sides”(Haeg 87, 2017). I believe this because the United Nations is meant to be an organization that promotes the well being of all humans and does not favor anyone country over another, therefore eliminating the need for malicious polibots.
This week I did not see the UN at Geneva twitter’s trend. However, with the looming coronavirus as we are seeing it still spread, it could very well trend. Also the 43rd regular session of the Human Rights Council did start on Monday so we will see if there is anything that brings about it to make them trend. For some fun I decided to use the Botometer on the UN at Geneva’s twitter account to see if this program thought the account was run by bots. I am happy to report that there is a 0.4 out of 5 chance that the UN at Geneva’s twitter account is run by a bot. I have linked the website below so that you can have some fun checking to see if your twitter friends and followers are actually bots.
Sam's Space 