“WANT BOYFRIEND ❌❌❌”: PORN BOTS, AUTHENTICITY AND SOCIAL AUTOMATION ON INSTAGRAM

Resumen

Whenever a celebrity posts a photo on Instagram, it is almost inevitable that the first comment on it will be made by a porn bot (Alvarez 2020). Observations of this kind – some focusing on the distorted perception of ‘sexiness’ and social media authenticity (Thing 2020; Salim 2023), others contesting Instagram’s community guidelines prohibiting both nudity and automation (Santos 2023) – have been ubiquitous in online tech reports for years. In academic discussions, scholars usually define porn bots as automated or semi-automated software agents that operate via sexual solicitation to capture attention (Narrang 2019). Twitter porn bots using Not Safe for Work (NSFW) hashtags to advertise commercial links have been addressed in their generic patterns (Paasonen, Jarrett, and Light 2019). Tumblr porn bots have generated significant controversy due to their uninterrupted operation during the platform’s so-called ‘porn ban’ (Pilipets and Paasonen 2020). Within Instagram, as we will show, porn bots continuously intervene in a network of relationships that users forge with the platform, avoiding detection through a range of circumvention tactics. In all these instances, porn bots operate as medium-specific, heterosexually scripted ‘personas’ (Bucher 2014), demonstrating remarkable adaptability to the platforms’ current cultures of use.