Bots are autonomous programs that are designed to mimic human users on social media. But how do they operate? Jason Thatcher, professor of management information systems and his co-authors Carolina Alves de Lima Salge and Elena Karahanna found that bots mainly operate in two ways.

First, in a process called algorithmic social alertness, they search, collect and curate information from a social media platform, and then they distribute this information back to the platform, in a process called algorithmic social transmission.