You have a bot? What, like, I have a bot. I'm in love with my bot. Tell me about your bot.

I'm in love with Resist bot. It's really simple. You sign up through a website. You plug in your phone number and you get a text message.

And it prompts you to write messages to your members of Congress.

And the Resist bot will turn it into a formally formatted fax that it sends to their offices.

Note to self, bots can be our friends or they can be our enemies. It's Vannu, SummerOdi.

And today we're going to explain the difference. So we can all make sure that these bits of code don't drive wedges between us humans.

That woman at the beginning was my sister Gita, she's been on the show before.

And the bot that she signed up for after the presidential election is like her personal civic assistant.

It makes contacting her Congressperson about issues that are important to her. Easy.

I've got a bot in my life too. Hundreds of them actually on Twitter.

Every day for the last month dozens of fake accounts have been following me there.

I don't know if they're good or bad. And guys has kind of been freaking me out. But we're going to get to that in a minute.

Because you see bots can go either way. Helpful bots do things like update the weather. They scan for the best price for that flight you're thinking about booking.

Then there are also bad bots like the social media bots we've been hearing about that have shaken the very core of American politics and the stability of the European Union.

This is not hyperbole. These bots are extremely influential.

You know, me closer to the might. Yeah, maybe that sounds better. Yeah.

And so at Oxford University their internet institute is researching bots as fast as possible led in part by this man.

My name is Phil Howard. I'm a professor at the University of Oxford and I study how politicians manipulate people.

Phil is a sociologist who researches how new technologies spread messages, which makes him the perfect person to explain why I've got all these new bot followers on Twitter.

I have been getting hundreds of followers every day and they're pretty obviously bots like they have people names, but they've never tweeted. And I don't understand what they want.

Well, one is that somebody has purchased some bots for you and they're trying to make you look more popular. Although I know you're very popular trying to make you look more popular.

I mean, who would do that? My mom? Maybe. Well, so the dark side of this is that it could be somebody who's bought them for you and assigned them to your account in case they're ever needed.

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