"When you ask experts how bots influence politics—that is, what specifically these bits of computer code that purport to be human can accomplish during an election—they will give you a list: bots can smear the opposition through personal attacks; they can exaggerate voters’ fears and anger by repeating short simple slogans; they can overstate popularity; they can derail conversations and draw attention to symbolic and ultimately meaningless ideas; they can spread false narratives."
Since when can bots "smear the opposition through personal attacks"? Bots that post the same stuff written by humans over and over have existed for years and are easily filtered out by spam filters - bulk spam doesn't change people's politics anyway so in practice such bots are always advertising commercial products. Bots that constantly invent new ways to smear the opposition don't yet exist, not even in the lab.
This whole story is asserting that there are programs routinely running around the internet indistinguishable from humans, making points so excellent they successfully persuade people to switch their political affiliation, which is simply false.
In the article the word "experts" is a hyperlink. I was very curious what kind of bot expert might believe these fantasies. To my total lack of surprise the link goes to a single "expert" who in fact knows nothing about AI, bots or technology in general - they're a political flak who worked for the Obama campaign and studied a PhD in "communication".
This sort of manipulative deception is exactly why so many people no longer trust the media. The New Yorker runs an article that starts by asserting a fantasy as expert-supported fact, and then cites a member of the Obama campaign who went into social science academia (i.e. a field that systematically 'discovers' things that are false), and who has no tech background or indeed any evidence of their thesis whatsoever.
My experience has been that actual experts in bots are never approached for this sort of story.