[freebreakfast]

The paper does not claim "bots aren't real." It claims:

> The field of “social bot” research is fundamentally flawed. While “social bot” researchers have received an enormous amount of public attention, their methods are highly dubious. And, as we and others have demonstrated, they fail miserably and consistently when evaluated under real-world conditions. Studies claiming to investigate the prevalence, properties, or influence of “social bots” have, in reality, just investigated false positives and artifacts of the flawed detection methods employed.