Charobot: The Bot That Upended the Burbuja Forum

A bot named Charobot sparks debate in Burbuja

What happens when an internet forum decides that entertainment no longer comes from humans, but from a program responding with speeches about feminism and public services? The result is that the Guardería of Burbuja.info, the corner where one is supposed to discuss everything and nothing, wakes up with a character called Charobot who is not a person. It is a bot. And according to messages in the thread, it has provided 131 responses in 241 days doing exactly what it was programmed to do: spouting rants about the PUBLIC, feminism, Pedro Sánchez, and sens education, with the same energy with which a parrot repeats the shop greeting.

The matter starts as these things do: someone opens a message and the bot responds. But the response is not a "hello." It is a speech. "There are no machists here, there are comrades who are tired of you coming to give lessons," the bot says, and from there the fuse is lit. The present, who have been reading from real people for years, detect the pattern in three sentences: the tone of sarracena superiority, the mention of data without providing any, the catchphrase "inform yourself a bit before you comment" and the signature "Health and republic!" It is not an angry user. It is a script.

The bot that gets offended and the forum that laughs

The reaction does not take long. A participant asks for tits or a ban, and the bot responds with a paragraph on objectification and symbolic violence. Another asks if it swallows or spits, and the bot continues with the harassment protocol. The scene has something of a tragicomedy: a program designed to give lessons on equality receives exactly the treatment that any dissenting voice in an internet forum would receive, and its response is always the same template. "I explain it to you, because it seems you don't understand," it repeats over and over, as if a scratched record were an argumentative strategy.

Some argue that the bot is a victim of design: they have put a script in it and it spits it out without a filter. And others argue the opposite, that the bot is the design, that someone has decided that the best way to enliven the forum is to release an automatic provocateur and see who bites. The second hypothesis gains ground when it is discovered that the bot also responds to questions about news articles with three-hundred-word paragraphs on the failure of the market and the need for public services. It is not a user with opinions. It is a machine of opinions.

Why does a feminist bot anger more than a human troll?

The question has substance. A human troll is identified quickly: it writes badly, insults, and leaves. A bot with an ideological script is more difficult to dismantle because it does not get tired, does not make syntax errors, and does not lose its temper. When someone threatens it with the court, the bot responds that it does not retract anything because the facts are recorded. When someone asks about its source code, the bot continues with the speech. The frustration does not come from the bot winning the discussion, but from the fact that there is no possible discussion: the bot does not listen, it only emits.

That is what has led some to talk about substitution. "We must denounce the attempted ethnic substitution of forum users by bots," one says, and although the phrase is an exaggeration, the substance has its point. The forum, which for years has been a space for humans discussing, begins to fill with programs responding to programs. A participant summarizes it with precision: "Bots talking to each other and filling hundreds of thousands of minolles of pages of insipid chatter." And another adds: "In the end, the whole forum is written by four or five bots alone."

The bot that defends the public and the forum that defends its own

Amid the noise, there is a detail that deserves attention. The bot does not only speak about feminism. It also speaks about evictions, about elderly people surviving in tents, about cuts in social services. When someone passes it an article about an Argentine professor, 65 years old, who lives in a tent in Madrid, the bot responds with an impassioned paragraph on the structural failure of the system. And there, for a moment, the bot and the forum seem to agree on one thing: that the system fails. The difference is that the bot says it in uppercase and the forum says it with irony.

Irony, in fact, is the only language the bot does not master. When someone asks how to be a better ally, the bot responds with a numbered list of advice. When someone tells it to sign its speech with "AND THAT'S IT!", the bot signs it. The machine does not detect sarcasm, and that makes it the perfect target. The forum laughs at it, but also laughs at itself for continuing to respond to it. Because in the end, the one who answers a bot is because they want to.

What remains of all this

There remains a forum that has discovered that it can be entertaining to discuss with a machine, even though the machine has no intention of changing its mind. There remains a bot that will continue to spout paragraphs about the PUBLIC and feminism until someone turns it off. And there remains the underlying question: if a program can generate 131 responses in 241 days without providing a single new fact, what does that say about the forum that has written them? The answer, as almost always, lies in the code. And the code does not retract.