The next frontier of online activism is ‘woke’ chatbots

Since early June, an account called @StayWokeBot has been doing its best to help keep others aware. The bot, a collaboration between activists DeRay Mckesson and Sam Sinyangwe and the tech cooperative Feel Train, is intended to protect and maintain morale among the black protest community. As of this writing, the bot does two things, though it may do more in the future: When a Twitter user initially follows @StayWokeBot, it auto-tweets them a singsong affirmation; when a follower tweets at the bot with his or her state, it responds with contact information for that state’s senators and a prompt to ask them to vote in favor of two gun-control measures. These sorts of repetitive, exhausting social media tasks — rallying the community, calling for action, facing down the angry @-replies of haters and critics — have long been the undertaking of activists themselves. But there’s a growing understanding that this work takes a lot of time, not to mention a profound emotional and psychological toll. And bots, of all things, could be the ones to absorb that kind of emotional labor. This idea, that bots could serve as a sort of proxy or extension of human activists, is a subtle shift from the activist and protest bots of the past.