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.
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