What Microsoft could have learned from veteran botmakers on Twitter.

It sometimes seems that automated bots are taking over social media and driving human discourse. But some (real) researchers aren’t so sure. --- Defining the bot is a tricky problem; technically, it could be any automated account, like a news aggregator, or amplification software, like Hootsuite. Mr. Kazemi found many bots tweeting about Covid-19, including neighborhood health clinics using marketing software to post daily pandemic P.S.A.s about washing your hands. He also found that humans were often mistaken for bots. Consider the “grandpa effect,” as he called it: people who were mistaken for bots because they used social media in “uncool or gauche” ways, he said. Users fond of hitting the share button on news articles also resulted in false positives. This led Mr. Kazemi to wonder whether Botometer should be renamed “Normiemeter.” He tweeted: “Can you imagine the headlines? ‘50% of accounts tweeting about Covid are normies.’”