Diogo Pacheco is a bot-hunter. For the uninitiated, bots are the ground troops of social media, autonomous accounts that post, tweet, or retweet. Some bots are harmless: sharing pictures of cats or jokes. Others, however, look like actual users and can engage in political or disinformation campaigns. With the University of Exeter and the Observatory on Social Media and Center for Complex Networks and Systems Research at Indiana University, Pacheco studies inauthentic activity online and examines how fake conversations and coordinated online networks can change our opinions and the way we think. Bots and fake accounts, which have invaded online conversations on everything from the coronavirus vaccines to the human rights crisis in Xinjiang, have been at the center of the debate about disinformation since President Trump was elected in 2016 and the UK’s Brexit referendum in the same year. 

I spoke to Pacheco about how he tracks bots and fake social media behavior. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Coda: How would you describe your job to someone who’s not in the bot world?

Diogo Pacheco: I try to be like a — not a spy, but an investigator. How can I try to exploit and unveil bad actors? I’m trying to do reverse engineering. I start with the assumption that there are bad guys out there, and I'm just trying to find them.