Ricerc@Sapienza

This essay explores potential risks associated with the proliferation of social bots on digital platforms. While it is evident from computer science scholarship that social bots play a key role in the spread of online (mis)information (Shao, Ciampaglia, Varol, Flammini, & Menczer, 2017), there is no sociological research on why bots act undisturbed on social networking platforms. Going beyond a merely technological approach, this paper aims at investigating the phenomenon of social bots from a sociological perspective.