An Army of 100 Bots Is Reading Climate Change News and Clicking Every Ad Along the Way

In an echo-y Zoom call with four full pages of participants, you can watch dozens of bots read articles about climate change, and click every ad along the way while they're at it, to support the publication. Synthetic Messenger, a project from artists Tega Brain and Sam Lavigne, is relying on these bots to make climate change news more visible.

On the internet, what news articles one sees is partially dependent on algorithms. In the most basic sense, what you click on when you search for something on a website like Google will increase its visibility in that particular search. This makes sense when you really just want to know how to convert measurements when you're cooking, something that has a discrete and consistent answer. When it comes to rapidly changing news events, broadly speaking, the algorithmic nature of the internet does not always make the most important news most visible.