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In 2016, “Post-truth” was declared as the international word of the year. It was described as something which could possibly become “one of the defining words of our time” by Oxford Dictionaries’ Casper Grathwohl, who explained: “Fuelled by the rise of Social Media as a news source and a growing distrust of facts offered up by the establishment, post-truth as a concept has been finding its linguistic footing for some time.”

Indeed, Social media’s rise to power has been a striking one, and as it continues to grow, it has developed into an invaluable tool in the culture of post-truth and unreality. The potency of social media is established even further when you consider the army of Bots which inhabit social platforms with the sole aim of injecting untruths, propaganda and disinformation into the streams of millions of people across the world.

Bots are simply a few lines of code with a set of programmed instructions to focus on a particular topic of conversation online, and fire out links and opinions incessantly and rapidly. There is also what are know as “cyborgs” which are bots occasionally used by humans to create a more natural and human looking profile.

Either way, they both act as a machine gun of propaganda and can flood hashtags on Twitter with strong views and links to articles which will eventually be shared by real users and prompt discussion based on disinformation in order to plant confusion and proliferate falsehoods among the population.

Computer scientists at the University of Southern California found that 15% of the accounts on Twitter which were discussing the United States General election were bots, and that they generated about 20% of the entire conversation around the election. Other research found that the “presence of social media bots can indeed negatively affect democratic political discussion rather than improving it, which in turn can potentially alter public opinion and endanger the integrity of the Presidential election.”

The University of Oxford conducted a detailed study on the use of political bots found that bots affected the flow of information during this Presidential election of 2016, concluding that: “bots are not only emerging as a widely-accepted tool of computational propaganda used by campaigners and citizens, but also that bots can influence political processes of global significance.”

An article in the New York Times described how bots, created and controlled by Russian’s, had turned social media platforms into “engines of deception and propaganda” and that “Russian fingerprints are on hundreds or thousands of fake accounts that regularly posted anti-Clinton messages.” That includes a group of Twitter bots, which on election day sent out the hashtag #WarOnDemocrats over 1,700 times.

Mark Hind, an investigative journalist, who has been tracking troll accounts and bots on social media platforms explains:

“What they want to achieve is the impression of a false social consensus. That’s why they flood the online world with this information because anyone happening to see that – and that includes politicians and policy makers and other journalists – they want them to believe this is the social consensus.”

In other words, bots are created to alter our perceptions of other people’s beliefs. They intend to make us believe that we’re in the minority and are used to manipulate public opinion by appealing to emotion.

By flooding social media with as much anti-Clinton messaging as possible, the bots managed to manufacture consensus. By spreading damaging information it allowed others to pounce onto posts and continue to spread them. In the Interpreter’s report on the Kremlin’s weaponization of information, it states that Russia supports a wide range of political movements in countries across the world with the intention to “exacerbate divides and create an echo chamber of Kremlin support” online.

While Russian President Putin claims there is “no proof” of Russia’s involvement, the CIA, FBI and NSA concluded that they could say with “high confidence” that Putin had in fact ordered the social media campaign to spread mass disinformation and as a result help Donald Trump to victory in the 2016 election.

Such a campaign looks to be one of many more to come, and social media platforms as well as their users need to be aware of the power and the dangers of such campaigns. As Vyacheslav W Polonski, a researcher at Oxford University has written, these Artificial Intelligence run bots could indeed be used for good; they could be programmed to point out false news and explain why an article may be untrustworthy. He asserts that politicians and campaigners must seek to use such Artificial Intelligence “ethically and judiciously” to ensure we avoid undermining democracy.

But in an environment where “Post-Truth” and “Fake News” reigns supreme, and where foreign governments can seemingly wage informational warfare with ease through social media, can we really hope to prevent or subdue this rise of sophisticated online propaganda? Another election is always just around the corner, and as we now know, so are an army of online robots, ready to strike.