Swarms of AI bots can sway people’s beliefs – threatening democracy

A simulation shows that social media bots powered by today’s AI can infiltrate human networks on social media and influence what people believe.

By: Filippo Menczer, Indiana University, The Conversation

Outlets: The Conversation

Published: February 12, 2026

Words: 1,195

Last Updated: 1 month ago

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By Filippo Menczer, Indiana University

In mid-2023, around the time Elon Musk rebranded Twitter as X but before he discontinued free academic access to the platform’s data, my colleagues and I looked for signs of social bot accounts posting content generated by artificial intelligence. Social bots are AI software that produce content and interact with people on social media. We uncovered a network of over a thousand bots involved in crypto scams. We dubbed …

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