By Renee DiResta, John Little, Jonathon Morgan, Lisa Maria Neudert and Ben Nimmo. Nov 2, 2017.

A taxonomy of politibots, a swelling force in global elections that cannot be ignored.

Editor's note: This essay is drawn from discussions and writings around a June 2017 convening organized and led by Samuel Woolley, Research Director of the new DigIntel Lab at the Institute for the Future, alongside fellow bot experts* Renee DiResta, John Little, Jonathon Morgan, Lisa Maria Neudert, and Ben Nimmo. The symposium was held at Jigsaw, the Google / Alphabet think-tank and technology incubator.

Bots and their cousins—botnets, bot armies, sockpuppets, fake accounts, sybils, automated trolls, influence networks—are a dominant new force in public discourse.

You may have heard that bots can be used to threaten activists, swing elections, and even engage in conversation with the President. Bots are the hip new media; Silicon Valley has marketed the chatbot as the next technological step after the app. Donald Trump himself has said he wouldn't have won last November without Twitter, where, researchers