Photo credits: Reddit, google, cheq.ai
Abstract
Bot farms can come in many shapes, sizes and forms. They can be phone, PC-based
or hybrid. The above picture shows a very small one, but they can be set up at a large
industrial scale to include thousands of fake and automated accounts. The many
articles used for this analysis breaks down how bot farms can be beneficial in parts, but
how it can be utilized to disseminate false narratives and influence public opinion
directly. It relates directly to social science principles because it is tied to human
manipulation like we have never seen before. Understanding the principles might give
us insight, crucial insight needed to be able to understand the intricacies and social
institutions of human behavior, to help us create better policies and defenses. It might
also be related to social economic theories due to the fact that bot farms can be used to
manipulate the economy, by influencing what to buy or what to boycott.
Article Analysis Paper: Are Bot Farms Friend or Foe?
It is well known that Russian bot farms, discovered in many cities around Ukraine
were purportedly attempting to sow discord and terror throughout Ukraine’s political
landscape. Additionally the Department of Justice announced the seizure of 968 social
media accounts and two domains used by Russian actors as well to spread
disinformation in the United States and abroad. So as you can see, bot farms are not
just used to set up only “likes” but it can have important social and political ramifications,
propagate propaganda which can have serious social and political repercussions, used
to sway public opinion, disseminate false information, and even tamper with elections.
The Justice Department is still investigating many of the cases related to bot farms.
A study showed that humans make about 80% of social media chatter regarding
world events, with 20% coming from bots. ClickGuard claims that there are programs
out there that imitates actual user behavior using scripts, to help evade social media
companies’ detection, making it difficult to track or distinguish from the two. It is stated
that humans use different linguistic cues which require understanding and actual
dialogue, bots only use simple words based on whatever categories they choose to
present, they both have different communication structure, so why is it so difficult to
detect?
These findings are based on a comprehensive examination of tweets from over
200 million users on social media during seven different events. When
social-cybersecurity researchers discovered that social media users were made up of
both human and artificial agents known as bots, social media bots became extremely
popular and a global sensation. Depending on how sophisticated and complex their
programming can be, it determines how bots can perform the vast numerous automated
operations, they can click webpages or buttons, can even complete extremely
complicated tasks that resemble actual human behaviors, including posting material,
leaving comments, or completing transactions.
Like we have discussed, there are many challenges that we come into face,
many research that state the obvious, but again our world in cybersecurity is evolving
quickly with every increasing threat, so why not use bots in our favor. To be able to
integrate bots to our fight in cybersecurity capabilities, to be able to have responses in
real time is becoming very common in the cybersecurity world.
They play strategically crucial roles in cybersecurity, automating processes
including incident response, threat detection, and vulnerability screening to mention a
few. They are able to operate continuously non-stop, processing enormous amounts of
data that would be impossible for any human analyst could never manage throughout
their lifetime. Quick fact: Over 50% of all internet traffic is currently processed by vast
bots, demonstrating their widespread use in cyberspace operations, both offensive and
defensive.
The concepts described in this analysis relate to most of the cybersecurity class
materials. Social cybersecurity gives priority to examine how cyber risks affect people
on a social level. Because of its unique situation, this field can tackle problems like
assaults on social media, including spam, cybercrime, cyberbullying, terrorist actions,
and community identification where bots farms can be directly involved. Bots can be
used as detection tools in cybersecurity, by creating different techniques and safeguards
we can potentially get ahead of the problem, and stop social cyberattacks before they
can even spread discounted throughout all users, it could help us be proactive in the
matter. This is a problem that needs to be handled for sure, it does not discriminate, it
affects everyone in one way or another, so it is imperative that it gets regulated at the
highs level so people won’t be manipulated, since it seems that now at day it has
become easier to influence human beings as never before. We still have many
challenges that we need to figure out as a society, but it seems that with the use of bots,
we are heading in the right direction.
There are many types of bots in cybersecurity that are created and programmed
to do different functions, some are defensive, and some are offensive which
professionals deploy to counterattack malicious bots to include the following:
1- Defensive Bots: which are used to help protect networks like Intrusion
Detection or Incident Detection Bots
2- Offensive Bots: are used to initiate attacks by hackers like DDos Bots, Spam
Bots
3- Recconnaissace Bots: These are my favorite bots, they are like spies looking
for open ports and looking for exploitable weaknesses to provide information about the
malicious targets.
By adopting Bots in cybersecurity we can find many advantages like, there are
fast, don’t require sleep, are efficient, the amount of data they can process is just
baffling, can identify threats, manage scalability with ease, their consistent and reliable,
are cost-effective and many more, we can write another paper on just there accolades
they can perform.
But like anything, bots are not perfect as well, they can have limitations like
creating false positives, might become victim of the adaptability of the sophistication of
cybercriminals, vulnerability to exploit and many more as well.
Conclusion
So are bot farms friend or foe? Like any technology it can be used for good or evil, so it
might feel divided because it might create more vulnerabilities, but also much good can
come from it.
Understanding the human mind might help us ride the train in the right direction, by
creating and improving them, for sure it has its advantages, because at the end of the
day we are only human, and we can only process things at a certain level.
Additionally the paper also highlighted numerous principles of social sciences in
cybersecurity, such as the relationship between social science research needed to understand their
creation and placements, the methods needed to incorporate in cybersecurity, human
factors and the psychology it takes on our lives via social media, the importance of
cybersecurity culture and social science via the educational perspective needed to
succeed.
So my vote of confidence goes that if used correctly bots can be a great tool in
cybersecurity, many factors that are positive and are shown in many researches, and
there have been many contributions with the overall positivity that bots can be a
success in the field of Cybersecurity, and one day, if used correctly, might help get us
back in shape getting read of all the misinformation currently shown around the world.
Resources:
Mulahuwaish, A., Qolomany, B., Gyorick, K., Abdo, J. B., Aledhari, M., Qadir, J., Carley,
K., & Al-Fuqaha, A. (2025). A survey of social cybersecurity: Techniques for attack
detection, evaluations, challenges, and future prospects. Computers in Human Behavior
Reports, 18, 100668. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.chbr.2025.100668
Company Blog. (2024, September 17). Bot farms: How they work & threaten your
business. DataDome.co. https://datadome.co/bot-management-protection/bot-farm/
Office of Public Affairs Press Release. (2025, February 6). Justice Department leads
efforts among federal, international, and private sector partners to disrupt covert
Russian government-operated Social Media Bot Farm. United States Department of
Justice.
https://www.justice.gov/archives/opa/pr/justice-department-leads-efforts-among-federal-i
nternational-and-private-sector-partners
What is a bot? types, mitigation & challenges. SentinelOne. (2025, July 22).
https://www.sentinelone.com/cybersecurity-101/cybersecurity/what-is-a-bot/#:~:text=The
%20Role%20of%20Bots%20in%20Cybersecurity,-The%20role%20of&text=On%20the
%20offensive%20side%2C%20bots,deploy%20countermeasures%20against%20malici
ous%20bots.
Zhang, Y., Song, W., Koura, Y. H., & Su, Y. (2023). Social Bots and Information
Propagation in Social Networks: Simulating Cooperative and Competitive Interaction
Dynamics. Systems, 11(4), 210. https://doi.org/10.3390/systems11040210
Haiz, H. (2024, September 9). The rise of Phone Bot Farms: A shortcut to social media
fame. Wake Up Singapore.