SWIFT MUGSY

Why Bots Are Bad For Your Business

So, my last post was about how using AI can tank your credibility and how the public really doesn’t want anything to do with generated slop. But, bots are another thing that we all want to avoid, though the reasons aren’t obvious to those who don’t follow how the social media algorithms work.

It used to be, back in the early days of the internet, that the sheer number of followers on an account was a sign of health and success. Truth be told, that was never really the case because the far more important metric of success has always been engagement.

And bots don’t engage. (At least, not in positive ways, I’ll get to that more in a minute.)

If your account gets flooded with bots – something that just happens, especially if you irk the Powers That Be with something like “don’t use slop” – then the percentage of accounts that engage drops like a stone, and the algorithms demote your SEO ranking and your social media visibility to nil.

Have a math:

Let’s say you have a small but vocal group of followers, and we’ll use 1,000 as the easy number to work with. These 1,000 people are followers to your account. 800 of them like your content regularly every time you post. Around 400 of them might share your content if it’s appropriate to do so, but only about 100 of them will actually comment (big or small comments, it doesn’t matter).

By the numbers, your high-quality followers are only 10% of your total audience. The other parts do matter, and of course these samples of the population overlap, but that’s a really amazing number to maintain – and one that indicates to the algorithm that your content drives engagement, pushing your organic visibility higher as the algo strives for more and more eyeball time with consumers.

But, if you’ve gotten on the radar of some random knob (automated or otherwise), you could end up going from 1,000 to over 10,000 accounts “following” you overnight.

Except, none of those extra 9,000 accounts are people who are going to engage in any way. They’re just taking up your space – and crashing your metrics because now those 100 people you were engaging with represent only 1% of the total number of followers.

And then, some random person comes along and sees that you have 10,000 followers, and while they like your content, they’re a little intimidated by the numbers and are less likely to become an engaged member of your community.

It gets worse.

Follower-flooding is a pain in the ass, and despite the damage it does, it’s almost innocuous compared to what botnets are actively up to in more recent days.

Bots have become more and more weaponized in the relatively unregulated environment of the internet: bots create seemingly legitimate accounts that are populated with misinformation or specific ideology or even scams and actual malware.

Remember those numbers up there and how engagement drives the algorithm? Imagine that the real humans in your online community – let’s use 1,000 again, just to be consistent – are left-leaning, compassionate, and non-religious. Your community gets flooded with 10,000 bots who start posting alt-right propaganda, hate speech, and faux-religious nationalism, and suddenly the algorithm flags your community as being with those other guys instead of what your actual focus is, because those bots are also talking to each other, driving up engagement on the other kinds of posts, and that skews not only how visible your online presence is but to whom it is visible.

There’s a well-heeled adage about a bartender in a punk bar. A patron is sitting there, and then a skinhead comes up and orders a beer. He’s not a jerk or anything, he just wants a beer. The bartender pulls out a baseball bat and tells the skinhead to get the f**k out. The patron is confused – the skinhead looked like any other punk – but the bartender points out that the skinhead had a patch on his jacket known to be associated with white supremacist groups. The bartender explains that maybe that one kid wasn’t so bad, but if he managed to get a beer, then he’d bring his buddy in for a beer the next night, and nothing bad happens. But, then over time, more and more buddies show up, and the skinheads becomes the dominant group either through numbers or volume, and then it’s not a punk bar anymore; it’s a skinhead bar, and only those people that skinheads approve of (their own kind) will do business there.

And at first, management doesn’t care. A skinhead pays the same for a pint of beer as anyone else, and, hey, he brings friends, and that’s more beer sold, but over a shockingly short period of time, the rest of the community – the core community – is pushed out by the discordance, and not only is the total volume of sales completely shot but the reputation of the bar is destroyed.

And worse… for a while.

As of last year, one study estimated that about 20% of the entities generating traffic on the internet were bots. Now, one might think, okay, that means that 80% of the traffic is human-sourced, but no, only 20% of the accounts generating engagement were bots – and bots don’t have to do things like sleep, eat, or only perform one task at a time. They can crank out magnitudes more nonsense than their meat-puppet counterparts. And remember that that study was from 2025, and the escalation of botnet creation has only accelerated.

And I mean really accelerated.

Between that study last year and March of 2026, the traffic just from AI has increased 8,000%. That’s not a typo, that’s a serious problem. For the average consumer, it means that the assumption we’ve relied on, that there was another person on the other side of every web-based interaction, is now completely wrong. For many, many years, I used “Remember the Human” as the cornerstone understanding of every training I ever gave, of every guidance I ever provided for how to manage communities and online interactions.

All hope is not lost!

And now? Well… maybe it’s more important than ever to Remember the Human.

There are countless ways to detect and combat bots in our social media and online spaces. A lot of advice recommends using other “good?” bots and AI to help protect you from the “bad?” bots and AI, but I tend to feel like that’s using the tools of the enemy. As one nearly-famous meme points out, AI is like the One Ring: you might think that you can use it because you’re a good guy, but it’s a fundamentally flawed device that ultimately leads only to corruption.

Is there a good, easy answer to dealing with bots? No, not really – not without resorting to measures that are less than palatable. I do have some thoughts, thought.

Use things like two-factor authentication to protect your accounts and prevent getting your online identity hijacked. Keep an eye on your traffic metrics and make sure you have a solid relationship with whomever is hosting your website. Use plugins that stop AI scrapers from accessing your content.

But… I’m of a different mind about it these days. I’m not sure how well it’ll pan out, but I’m committed to trying. More on this soon.