'I think it is very likely that we as a society will establish norms about what kind of bots it will be ok to deploy - or not,' she told DW. 'At the beginning of the Syrian civil war, when journalists and interested publics outside the country were trying to find out what was going on in the country, the regime used bots to flood the #syria hashtag and kill it as a source of information about the resistance.'ДЄre bots a danger to democracy? Is a future possible where elections will be won by the party with superior bots? Saiph Savage, a computer scientist at West Virginia University, is not too worried. So bots are quite active in Russia, and part of an overall successful regime strategy to muddy issues and sow misinformation.' 'Where they work the best is in sowing confusion or choking off a political conversation on a global issue that involves an authoritarian government. 'We haven't caught a bot significantly pushing public opinion in a particular direction in a democracy,' said Howard, who leads a multi-disciplinary research project on political bots. Mexico and Turkey are two cases where bots have been used especially widely. They are similarly employed by many politicians in democracies in order to influence citizens' opinions on controversial issues, or to make a difference in elections. 'If it is following thousands of users, but has only one follower, it is probably a bot.'Д«ots have become a tool of choice for dictators and authoritarian regimes with an interest in manipulating online debate. 'If one of the users in your network seems to have thousands of followers, but is only following one person, it is probably a bot,' he said. There are certain pointers though, such as very unbalanced profiles.

We've seen real people argue with bots,' Phil Howard, professor at the Oxford Internet Institute, told DW via e-mail.ДЇor individual users, bots can be tough to spot, according to Howard. 'Bots often get tangled up in each other's scripts.

Political bots come in different shapes: Fake followers mainly bolster the number of online supporters for a politician bot armies 'Twitter-bomb' discussions on certain topics in order to marginalize other viewpoints and more sophisticated versions will react to certain keywords by starting a debate with others. The implications of bots for political discourse on social media are another open question.Д¬ompared to other platforms like Facebook, bots are most easy to deploy and most effective on Twitter, and it is there that they have been used most commonly for political purposes. Last year, it was reported that a Dutch web developer was called in for questioning by police after their bot had, in a similarly random manner, put together a statement (tweeted at another bot, incidentally) which an internet detective read as a death threat. The rise of bots has thrown up a wide range of new issues.

World at war bots