Bots: Some Less-Considered Epistemic Problems

ABSTRACT Posts on social media platforms like Twitter are sometimes the products of deceptively designed bots. These bots can cause obvious epistemic problems, such as tricking human users into believing the contents of misleading posts. However, less-considered epistemic problems involve false bot judgements where a human user mistakes another human user’s post for a bot-post, or where a human user mistakenly believes that bots are the primary vehicles for tokening certain content on social media. This paper takes up three questions concerning false bot judgements: what exactly are their associated epistemic harms, just how harmful are they, and what should we do about them?