Speaking of bots: Unpacking representations of political bots in news media discourse

With this article, we want to contribute to a more comprehensive examination of the ways in which bots are constituted, directly or indirectly, in media discourse. Firstly, we map the contemporary news discourse on political bots and the surrounding discursive context in order to create an understanding of how bots, as a concept, are assigned meaning. Secondly, we ask to which political conflict lines such representations are discursively connected and related, thereby investigating the symbolic and rhetorical role of bots in the construction of political conflicts. We do this by analysing a data set consisting of Swedish print news media articles published during 2018 and 2022. Key results following the analysis are that political bots, bundled together with artificial intelligence (AI) and other various manifestations of digital communication technologies, are constructed as an integral part of the social media machinery in terms of a risk to the well-functioning democracy in contemporary society. In Swedish news media discourse, bots, algorithms, AI and their deployment across various social media platforms are portrayed as a clear danger to the capacities of deliberative democracy. Analysing these news media narratives, it could be argued that they bear traits similar to those of a moral panic reaction.