What is Truth in the Era of Bots?

I am teaching a course about misinformation and the Bible this semester and Pilate’s famous question “What is truth?” has been in my mind, and what truth is in the era of bots that we find ourselves in. This blog provides not only a useful supplement to what I say in class, but a chance to talk with a larger audience.

If you have ventured into online spaces and seen appalling comments responding in inhumane and inhuman ways to the murder of Renee Good by ICE thug Jonathan Ross, I hope you have noticed something else. While there are definitely some genuine humans saying horrific things, did you notice how many of the accounts have nothing personal whatsoever? No personal details, no posts of the sort a human being would share. Just generic images and then hateful speech.

Those are bots.

If you’re not familiar with them, social media is full of bots. These are automated accounts that no one runs directly. They offer AI-generated content as though it were coming from an actual person, offering partisan talking points, outlandish hate speech, misinformation, or whatever else they have been programmed and instructed to.

As the recent book FAIK but also many others point out, humans are psychologically prone to see a lot of posts and think ‘wow, lots of people are saying that, it must be true.’ The era of bots means that it is easier than ever to harness technology  to exploit this human weakness.

If you have been horrified by the people who have been commenting callously in response to the recent murder of Renee Good, hopefully this will encourage you. There are definitely real people among them, but how many of them are un discerning political partisans who fell for and followed some similarly partisan bots and now think they are just safely siding with the majority, the crowd that must be right, not realizing how many of those accounts provide no indication of what actual humans think?

The topic of misinformation is directly related to the focus of my forthcoming book Beyond Deconstruction. One reason people experience the catastrophic and crisis-inducing collapse of their worldview is the fact that we get ourselves into information bubbles that leave us prone to deception. That’s not unlike the role the bots play online. Even before likeminded humans find one another, algorithmic processes can surround you with what seem like likeminded individuals, taking your worst tendencies toward suspicion and demonization and nudging them in the direction their creators wish. If so many people think like this, we must be correct! Yet at that point it isn’t people and there’s no “we.” By the end of the bots’ work on a variety of individuals, there ends up being a community that has been discipled into hatred, all thinking that because they are surrounded by a great swarm of bot witnesses, they are the majority.

It is important to highlight this for multiple reasons. One is to rescue those who have been deceived. The victims of this technology must not be treated with a lack of empathy. The tactic of the bots to reinforce stereotypes and to demonize cannot be overcome by behavior that will seem to confirm to what they have been told. Another reason is that, if those who stand for love, human rights, justice, and inclusion make the same mistake and think the bots are people, we will be tempted to despair, feeling that we are outnumbered.

This is what current technology can do. And those who have created the bots, just like those who sought to weaponize Evangelical Christianity in the service of the Republican party in the 1970s and 1980s by older technological means (radio, television, books, etc.), know how to weave select Bible verses and religious rhetoric into the output.

So what is truth in the era of bots? It is the same as ever. It is the closest approximation to truth that honest humans investigating from diverse backgrounds and perspectives converge on. It is also love and kindness.

In the era of bots, we wrestle not against flesh and blood but against principalities and powers in the digital realm. Behind those, of course, there are malevolent humans. And they in turn are victims of harmful cultural and/or family influences which have brought out their worst tendencies.

Few of us have direct access to those individuals, and so we will have little or no opportunity to urge them towards repentance and redemption. But we can and indeed must show empathy to their victims, not least because they are human beings like us and we are all capable of being led astray. That has always been true. In this era of bots, and of artificial intelligence of various sorts, it is just easier to accomplish.