Meta rang in the new year with controversy. After the company’s generative AI plans for 2025 were made public, keen-eyed users dug out old bot personas that have existed on the platform since 2023, highlighting errors in chats with real users, hallucinations, and issues with cultural appropriation.
Although Meta has since deleted all bot personas from its platform, the debate around institutionalising bots on our social platforms raised some pertinent questions around trust and safety on social media in ‘the age of the bot’ – particularly for advertisers. If bot personas do become the norm online, will users still be able to trust what they see on social media? And can advertisers still trust social media platforms as a valuable avenue for ad spend?
The $234.14 billion question
Digital advertisers spend a staggering amount on social media ads: an estimated $234.14 billion in 2024, a 140% increase from five years earlier. That relationship has been so successful because of social media’s ability to provide advertisers with precise targeting data – ensuring their ads are fed to exactly the right people. This relationship is threatened when advertisers can’t trust the data they receive, or when they are charged for clicks from fake users or bots, otherwise known as click fraud.
Advertisers have historically been willing to accept a certain amount of click fraud as a kind of budgeted loss, after all, bot traffic already accounts for almost half of all web traffic. Over time, however, this can seriously damage ROI. Between 2023 and 2028, cumulative costs related to digital advertising fraud are estimated to reach US $172 billion.
Many advertisers, particularly small businesses, have limited tools available to measure the proportion of their advertising budget that is wasted on click fraud. Ultimately, this means that if advertisers can’t trust that social media platforms are doing enough to keep bots, fake users and AI personas off their platform, they may stop advertising there all together. This logic extends even to post interactions, another foundational metric of digital advertising.
Advertisers also have to consider issues around reputation and integrity. We witnessed advertisers fleeing Twitter en-masse as it morphed into X, a platform with more bots and less moderation. Now Meta has reduced its fact checking and is discussing increased generative AI presence on the platform, advertisers might be rightfully concerned about the integrity of the other content their ads will be placed alongside.
Finally, there’s the question of data privacy. It’s not yet clear how interactions with bot personas on social media would impact user data collection and privacy, and it remains to be seen where the conversation data between users and bots would end up. These factors are also likely to contribute towards a mass exodus away from any platform that explores new bot features. Ultimately advertisers want to invest where there is high traffic – so it’s important that social platforms keep users on side and stop them from jumping ship to another platform they consider more trustworthy.
The impact outside of advertising
Outside of the advertising world, the potential for misinformation to be spread by bot personas on social media is huge. This is not without precedent: we’ve seen a great deal of controversy around the ability for bots to shape the narrative around the 2024 elections for example, or spread ‘fake news’ around the COVID-19 pandemic.
If bot personas are accepted on social media platforms, it’s also bound to impact the influencer industry. AI bot influencers aren’t new – there are already some, like Miquela, worth millions of dollars. But with the introduction of official bot accounts on platforms like Meta, this trend could go further. What will this mean for the $21.1 billion influencer industry? Because bot accounts can like or comment on posts, it’ll become harder to differentiate the influencers that are trending on their own merit from those that are being boosted by the social media platform.
What’s next?
Whether this is the beginning of a new generation of social media bots remains to be seen. Meta itself might be reluctant to reintroduce bot features anytime soon, but the level of publicity the story generated might be enough to inspire other social platforms to follow in Meta’s footsteps with their own bot accounts.
It’s unrealistic to demand that social media platforms refuse to experiment with bot features in the future. But the tech industry should be calling for more regulation around bots on social media, and better transparency from platforms like Meta if they do decide to embrace bots on their platforms. It’s important that platforms have standardised labels to clearly disclose bot accounts and distinguish these from real human users.
Unless advertisers have full transparency over how bots are interacting with content on social media platforms, they’re unlikely to feel confident continuing to invest heavily in social media advertising.
- Benjamin Barrier is the co-founder and chief strategy officer at bot and online fraud protection platform, DataDome.
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