Following up on our previous post ‘How the GameStop Stock Event Ushers a New Era of Collective Resistance‘, new reports have emerged of bots having also had a significant impact on what happened to this particular stock (see ‘Did Bots Help Push GameStop And Other ‘Meme Stocks’? A New Report Says Yes!‘ or ‘Thousands Of Bots May Have Played Role In GameStop Hype: Report‘. Those bots could have influenced users of social networks by amplifying an existing trend.
“It should be noted that real human beings did indeed start the conversation and push surrounding the GameStop stock and other meme stocks. The report indicates that bots were at least partly responsible for hyping and promoting these stocks once the initial Redditor-inspired campaign took off, however.” We thus seem to be in the presence of a phenomenon of bot-amplification of a trend.
This shows how bots can amplify or conversely moderate the impact of trends on social media, depending probably on how they are driven by the people who create them.
This example, like many others, shows how public opinion can be highly vulnerable to bots that mimic social media users and serve to amplify certain trends, shares and opinions at the expense of others. It is a great opportunity to explore for those that want to highlight their views, and at the same time an issue to be regulated to make sure that opinion diversity remains and to avoid extreme trends to prevail.
