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The next step will be to release bots that aren't labeled as bots. They'll be influencers (advertisers) without having to pay a person. They'll produce hyper targeted influencer slop, hocking products directly to individuals using Facebook's knowledge graphs of users to be incredibly manipulative. Companies will pay Facebook to make people siphon money directly to them.

It'll be like entirely automated catfishing.

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1. Create AI bot 2. Wait until it gets lots of followers 3. Sell mentions of products by popular AI bot. Profit.

Sure, they faltered at Step 2, but how was this not the plan?

The future bots won't need followers. They will reach out to engage users based on their ad graph. Like how catfish accounts work.

They'll reach out to users and talk to them about whatever they're interested in. They'll then make influencer-style native advertisements. If you're a middle aged man that likes video games when you see their picture posts they'll be "wearing" some vintage game t-shirt (that's for sale). If you're instead a twenty year old woman into yoga the same bit will be "wearing" some new Lululemon yoga pants.

The first pass of these bots failed because they used the follower mechanism. The next version will just follow you to push ads or scrape more data about you.

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