24/7 horny&training’: porn bots, authenticity, and social automation on Instagram

This article presents a conceptual and methodological account of a small porn bot network, focusing on its embeddedness within Instagram use. The analysis explores the gendered design of bots as platform-native personas, particularly their capacity to perform within the confines of Instagram’s increasingly strict sexual content controls. We address three performative trajectories in the bot-exploited ‘Instagrammatics’ of identity play, social influence, and attention capture. We argue that a bot programmed to operate with sexual content to generate attention relies on the paradoxical blend of pornographic ‘imagination’ and social media ‘authenticity’. For our analysis, we manually identified 30 porn bot accounts spamming in the comment sections of highly visible Instagram posts (those published by @justinbieber). We then collected associated metadata – bot profile names and images, comments and comment likers, followers and followings, bot content, and links in the bot profile bios. By variously situating and combining these data, we discuss how networked automation taps into the sexualized social scripts imitated by ‘artificial’ and ‘authentic’ users alike. Our findings point to how porn bots re-enact gender as a programmed set of instructions, adapting to Instagram’s vision of acceptable sexuality and revealing its normative order.