[drdeca]

I suppose if “bot” came to refer separately to mass-sockpuppeting as well as to automated messages, that wouldn’t really be that unfortunate of a change in the meaning of the phrase, so I could accept it.

I would prefer things that don’t have any significant automation to them be called something related to sockpuppets than bots, but sockpuppet is unwieldy because it is much longer, both in speech and in writing, so if there is no abbreviation for “sockpuppet”/“sockpuppet master” which is convenient, easily understandable, and feels right to use, then I guess that could be justification enough to call them “bots” despite there being little automation to it.

Regardless, I think the big issue is how people can use these techniques to massively overrepresent how common certain views are compared to other views, regardless of whether it uses any automation. (Because of this, when I make multiple accounts on some service which I keep separate from one-another, which isn’t often, I try to say in my user profiles roughly how many other accounts I have on the service, to avoid contributing to this problem. This has only come up on one website for me though.)

(Also many-account auto-liking would qualify as “being bots” in the narrow sense IMO even if the tweets were all manual. And automation certainly makes the problem bigger.)

[Jordrok]

Personally, I tend to just call those "fake" accounts. Fake, in the sense that the person behind that account is someone other than who they are claiming to be - whether that is a specific human being with a name and a picture, or just an anonymous, discrete individual who is distinct from anyone else already involved in the conversation.