A New Threat to Democracy? Examining the Democratic Implications of the Social Bot Phenomenon

Social media provides tools that enable people to share their political views and coordinate collective action and has often been praised for entailing numerous democratic opportunities. But what happens when someone finds a way to exploit these tools? Social bots, algorithmically driven software programs designed to mimic and possibly alter human behavior on social media forums, have been used to manipulate public opinion during several major political events during the last few years. The purpose of this study is to analyze the social bot phenomenon from a democratic perspective. Our research question is: what are the democratic implications of the use of social bots in political discussions online? To answer this, we have applied a theoretical framework consisting of suitable deliberative democracy theories on relevant empirical material. Our findings suggest that the use of social bots indeed has democratic implications, mostly because the bots spread inaccurate information on political topics and distort political discussions online