Brandon Taylor is an assistant professor of English at Mount Marty University.
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The Parable of the Internet Bots
A synthetic chorus has taken root across so much of the online world that it is getting difficult to tell the difference between human voices and manufactured ones. With the 2026 midterm elections approaching, the incentive to flood public spaces with manufactured consensus will only grow. In an age of astroturf-filled message boards, I would argue that the greater danger is the impulse to hunt for bots. Astroturfing is an activity performed by a person or a group in order to generate the surface texture of reasonable speech, but to do so in a way that overwhelms the ordinary human capacity to slow down and make appropriate judgments.
The result is a culture of interpretation that begins with triage, where we read less for meaning and more for signs of inauthenticity; where the first question is whether the voice in front of us is even a person. Hunting for bots trains us to view the world with an extra amount of suspicion; a suspicion that deepens our collective alienation. Jesus’ parable about the weeds among the wheat offers our culture an important lesson in how to press toward face-to-face interactions that will make neighborliness possible again.
Can We Trade Our Social Media Wars for Something Better?
Our entire system is sick. Do we want to be well?
IN A 2025 general audience, Pope Leo XIV drew listeners’ attention to the “cry of pain rising from places devastated by war, especially Ukraine, Iran, Israel and Gaza.” He warned that “we must never get used to war.”
He was identifying a condition already visible on social media, where footage of Russian drones bombing Ukraine and ICE agents raiding neighborhoods in Chicago and Minneapolis is nestled neatly between cat videos and cooking clips as just another type of consumable digital content. These incidents of violence once represented distinct breaks with the ordinary—moments when civic trust collapsed into the mire of conflict. Now, they are part of the endless stream of videos sifted, reacted to, reframed, and absorbed by a political and media apparatus primed for soliciting dramatic responses.