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.

The same anxious posture toward bots is now everywhere online. Accusing someone of being a “bot” consequently becomes an all-purpose explanation for disagreement. This pattern has trained us to look at people not merely as strangers, but as nonhumans. Trust cannot survive if we continue to approach public life with such suspicion.

In Matthew 13:24–30, Jesus offers a straightforward scene. A householder plants good seed in his field, and the expectation is that the field will produce what was planted. The disruption comes at night, when an enemy sows weeds among the wheat and leaves before anyone sees him. When the plants grow, the servants notice that weeds have been sown among the wheat, which causes them to ask: If the seed was good, why are weeds growing here at all?

Their natural desire is to go into the field and pull the weeds immediately. But the householder refuses, because he does not want the wheat uprooted with the weeds. “Let them both grow together until the harvest,” he tells the servants. And then, “at harvest time I will tell the reapers, Collect the weeds first and bind them in bundles to be burned, but gather the wheat into my barn” (v. 30).

To a certain extent, the servants’ instinct is reasonable. They see a mixed field, and they want to restore it as quickly as possible. It is hard to live with the mess and anxiety that a messy field can produce. It is also hard to explain to other people why we should wait to pull up the weeds when they are already visible. A similar rationality is recognizable in the present moment when it comes to searching for bots: delay will cause the contamination to spread.

Identifying a bot brings us a certain kind of relief. We tell ourselves that we have done our small part to restore order to a messy field, protecting ourselves and others from being duped. It also offers us an escape: Instead of doing the harder work of engaging in a meaningful conversation with another real person, we dismiss our interlocutor as a bot.

This approach to public discourse teaches us to immediately treat those we disagree with as threats, and it erodes the basic trust that makes substantial conversations possible. In the name of protecting the field, we tear up the weeds and, in doing so, destroy the wheat.

When it comes to public discourse on the internet, all it takes for a space that was once a place for constructive conversation to devolve into a corrupted field is the slightest appearance of weeds—that is, bots. Of course, the issue of bots—and the scale at which they are threatening our democracy—makes the situation complex. In the past, we could assume that most conversations, even ugly ones, were still conversations among people. But that assumption is harder to hang onto now, thanks in large part, to artificial intelligence. On Reddit pages devoted to political issues and other sensitive topics, threads are filled with AI bots leaving comments designed to provoke and escalate arguments. Ultimately, the space trains us to be suspicious of those we disagree with, authorizing us to view them as nonhuman.

READ MORE: A Christian Plan to Save the Internet

Under these conditions, accusation becomes habit. It is easier to label something as fake rather than risk being fooled, and it is easier to withdraw into a smaller circle than to stay exposed in a public square that feels unstable. That withdrawal can feel like protection when we are tired of being manipulated, but it also narrows our perspective and leaves us isolated. In an election year, that isolation is the exact purpose of such campaigns.

Jesus’ parable helps us because it pushes back against the idea that vigilance can purify the field and because it forces us to reckon with what suspicion does to us when it becomes our default way of navigating the world. Such an approach to the world gives us permission to disengage from conversations entirely.

Jesus’ parable helps us because it pushes back against the idea that vigilance can purify the field and because it forces us to reckon with what suspicion does to us when it becomes our default way of navigating the world.

In Jesus’ parable, the sower’s restraint is a discipline of judgment in which he takes collateral damage seriously because he knows the field is a living organism.

In our moment, this discipline matters because suspicion is now treated as maturity and because the pressure to sort quickly is rewarded in almost every online space where astroturfing runs rampant. Restraint requires accountability and patience. Exercising the sower’s restraint requires us to stay present in a messy field while practicing discernment.

Practically speaking, this same disciplined restraint should become a habit in each of our social domains. In households, it means pausing before responding in a way that spikes anger or fear. In congregations and other local communities, it means protecting face-to-face spaces where people can disagree without collapsing into suspicion. Neighborliness requires presence and the willingness to stay in the room with people you vehemently disagree with.

Such a setting provides us the opportunity to reap a harvest. Instead of culling both the weeds and the wheat, we patiently examine the field and scrutinize the arguments—naming weeds as weeds and wheat as wheat.

There are limits to such an approach—coordinated racist harassment campaigns targeting voters, online networks that recruit and radicalize people toward real-world violence, or coordinated voter suppression campaigns using manufactured speech to impersonate candidates—and it is important to point this out, as some harm requires immediate action. A field full of weeds requires our attention, but it cannot mean that we orient our public life together entirely around hunting down and rooting out bots. If we cultivate the habit of looking for bots everywhere, then suspicion becomes our default posture, and that posture will spread into every space we enter. At that point, we will not need an enemy to ruin the field because we will have done it ourselves.