Balancing AI And Human Interaction On Social Media
Rodger Desai is the Founder and CEO of Prove.
Social media bots make up a sizable portion of internet traffic on the most prominent social media platforms; they are designed to mimic human users on a large scale, either partially or fully autonomously. Initially designed to make it easier for account owners to provide beneficial services like sports and weather updates for their followers, most bots in recent years have come to take on a new purpose.
Many social media platforms are now overrun by bots with malicious intentions: to spam, impersonate or scam. AI has only amplified the problem, and developing, training and deploying bots to mimic humans on social media has never been easier.
The purpose of social media platforms has evolved over the past twenty years to become hubs for information exchange and consumption rather than status updates and entertainment. This shift fostered a rapid rise of bad actors—empowered by algorithms, inflated engagement and now AI—to misinform, impersonate and manipulate the public. While our digital culture has changed, human engagement is still key to curating social media.
As users continue to flock to social media for news, current events and public discourse, their thoughts and beliefs must be reliably relayed and easily consumable. Social media platforms must develop the infrastructure to verify, moderate and use bots and automated content safety, as users cannot identify who is on the other side of the screen—a bot, a bad actor or a real person.
The Problem For Users
Improper verification systems result in a subpar user experience—one characterized by spam and irrelevant content—which directly affects a platform’s reputation and, thus, new sign-ups and retention. If platforms do not require identity verification for new accounts, users are burdened with increased due diligence to ensure both the content they consume and its publisher are human-made.
Consumers are beginning to overlook platforms whose verification systems are easily evaded by bots and bad actors or are pivoting to different platforms entirely, as seen with the influx of X users to Bluesky in recent weeks.
With increased responsibility placed on the user and preferential algorithmic treatment for bots, platforms that lack verification standards remove the “social” functions from social media. For these platforms to fulfill their intended purpose and develop thriving communities, users must be able to post authentically to their audiences with relevant results.
The Problem For Creators
New industries and income opportunities have formed out of the prominence of social media platforms, offering content creators new opportunities for growth, skill-building and community. However, for these networks to thrive, they must increase trust with their users and content creators.
Critics have rebuked social media platforms for allowing AI-powered bot spam in comments and replies. This impedes user engagement with the content and hampers creators’ ability to establish credibility and maintain a consistent audience.
Additionally, most of the profit made from content creation on social media is through advertising revenues. The influx of AI-powered bots on platforms like YouTube provides a false impression of popularity, with inflated engagement rates that are attractive to advertisers and directly affect human creators and audiences.
In some cases, automated accounts or human-operated accounts boosted by AI-driven engagement are given preferential advertising dollars over humans, which undercuts the principles of curation and authenticity needed for social media platforms.
Verified Bots
Authenticity from content creators and their audiences on these platforms is crucial for growing audiences, making profit and for advertisers to serve relevant content to their audiences. Although advanced in speed and scale, social media bots often fail to convincingly portray human behavior, making them easily identifiable as automated accounts and consequently dismissed as spam.
Without proper infrastructure to verify and authenticate new user identities, content posted by bots will never be held to the same standard for credibility as organic human content—even if no bad intent is detected. However, by implementing identity verification practices, social media platforms can confidently support the rapid onboarding of new users—both human and automated—and foster a safe community to engage, network and share information.
To enhance authentication, platforms can link verified user identities to bot accounts pre-approved to interact on their behalf, reducing the stigma associated with automated accounts and the amount of spam on the platform entirely. This can add value to engagement such as likes and comments, ensuring that engagement reflects the real interaction behind the screen, eliminate falsified or inflated engagement from malicious bot accounts and enable creators to reduce time spent on the administrative elements of building their platforms.
Through device-based intelligence, like mobile and telecom signals, platforms can shift their identity verification practices from a user-effort-intensive onboarding step to a passive, ongoing process that is invisible on the user end. Since there is no silver bullet for completely eliminating fraud on public platforms, a secure, reliable content consumption experience is becoming a factor that increasingly attracts and retains consumers.
In a world where we are our own fact-checkers, linking verified user identities to automated social media accounts could increase trust between all parties interacting on social media platforms, assuring users that those they interact with are who they say they are and reducing concerns about impersonation, fraud and misrepresentation.
In tandem, increased trust between users can lead to increased engagement on the platform and enhanced platform credibility, solidifying its reputation as a safe, trustworthy platform. Adopting these practices not only ensures secure ongoing identity verification but also signals to users that these platforms embrace the technologies the public is excited about and are likely to transform the way we interact with each other online.
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