The word 'bot' is increasingly being used as an insult on social media

The presentation of this article is confusing. Does the author or this researcher actually think this is novel enough to write about like this? Or are they just too embarrassed to have a single paragraph that translates roughly to "here's another minor development that's entirely in line with everyone's mental model" and leave it at that?

Quoting Urban Dictionary:

> Someone that doesn't question the matrix and society as it is. They usually share the same characteristics as robots and AI's. They often run on auto pilot and work a 9-5 and come home to surf their phones and mindlessly open and close Instagram and twitter.

Or:

> When someone acts like an npc

So basically just language evolving. Same as how the meaning of "cap" changed, and it means something different when used before vs after the year, I don't know, 2018-ish?

I remember around the time of the 2020 Democratic primaries it was really commonly used by no-hopers for Kamala Harris. Their whole toolkit was basically condescending put-downs so they latched on to it hard. Didn't matter how obviously real the account was, and I got the impression that they really believed what they were saying.

It’s been an insult on imageboards since at least 2014, when it became obvious Russians had started spamming shit for political reasons.

Hell, Reddit has the same thing because they deal with both political and commercial spam.

Back in the day when I was playing Call of Duty; every time when you were on a kill streak somebody would call you bot or hacker. That's actually pretty common even to this day in the gaming community.

Wasn't this an old school insult back from CS 1.6 days (probably even before), or was it only used among my friends?

I'm reminded of tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow, calling someone an NPC.

How does this relate to npc?

Supplanted it? Or younger gen using bot?

I saw an argument I didn't like, so I called them a "bot", because that's what I've seen other people in my group do. (/s)

So we have a cool new word that makes it easier for people to disagree, ignore, not discuss, and not understand. Words have power, and this one is a loss for humanity.