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  2. social-media-ethics-automation.github.io social-media-ethics-automation.github.io
    1. Botwatch: for the interest and study of reddit bots. URL: https://www.reddit.com/r/botwatch/ (visited on 2023-11-17).

      This is a subreddit discussing bots. One post fascinated me. A recent forecast told us that 'bot users' may be more than 1000 times higher than human ones. Reddit was a platform where I sometimes felt a human connection through finding subreddits, users, and conversations that I was able to relate to, whether emotionally, physically, or in terms of interests, and now it's a platform mostly full of machines. Also, on a subreddit about bots, most of these users and their post may ironically just be bots!

    1. This lets the social media platform track these registered bots and provide certain capabilities and limits to the bots (like a rate limit on how often the bot can post). But when some people want to get around these limits, they can make bots that don’t use this official API, but instead, open the website or app and then have a program perform clicks and scrolls the way a human might. These are much harder for social media platforms to track, and they normally ban accounts doing this if they are able to figure out that is what is happening.

      The fact that platforms can 'provide certain capabilities' and 'limit' rather than banning them altogether really surprises me. To a certain degree, do platforms enjoy having bots take over? People care enough to create bots for your platform, also, sometimes what they can post can generate more engagement.