Too Long; Didn't Read
Two-thirds of Americans know what bots are, from a strictly negative perspective—and not without good reason. But bots are not inherently forces of manipulation and disinformation, they are simply automated programs that run tasks repetitively. Bots take on an enormous amount of labor in today’s Internet; with “good” bots consisting of 13% of Internet traffic and ‘bad’ bots 24% of traffic. Bots play a large role in spreading low-credibility articles before they are picked up by humans and go viral.