Jon Roozenbeek: Bots for sale: understanding the online manipulation market
Join us for a seminar featuring Jon Roozenbeek, University of Cambridge. He will talk about "Bots for sale: understanding the online manipulation market".
According to Jon Roozenbeek, research shows much of today's internet traffic is driven by "bad bots" — scraping data, scalping tickets, spreading disinformation and running scams. Photo illustration: private photo & Yuri Arcurs/Mostphotos
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Studies show that enormous volumes of internet traffic are driven by so-called “bad bots”, designed to trawl websites for information, scalp event tickets, spread disinformation, or scam people out of money. Underneath this sits a thriving marketplace where such bots and other types of inauthentic online activity (such as fake likes and comments on social media pages) are openly for sale. In this talk, Jon Roozenbeek discusses how this online manipulation market works, its impacts on public discourse, what predicts the price of various manipulation services, and how global governance can counteract the manipulation market’s incentive structures, for example with respect to the buying and selling of SIM cards.
Bio
Jon Roozenbeek is Director of the Influence and Technology Lab (ITLab), which sits between Cambridge's Department of Psychology and the Department of Communication Science at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam. His research focuses on (mis)belief formation, intergroup conflict (particularly in Russia and Ukraine), polarisation, underground manipulation markets, and the use and misuse of modern communication technologies.
He holds a PhD in Slavonic Studies (2020), also from the University of Cambridge, for which he studied propaganda and ideology-building in Russian-occupied Donbas (Ukraine). Jon has authored two recent books with Cambridge University Press: The Psychology of Misinformation (with Sander van der Linden) and Propaganda and Ideology in the Russian-Ukrainian War.
In addition, he has written more than 70 peer-reviewed publications, published in journals including Science, Nature, Nature Human Behaviour, Nature Communications, Nature Computational Science, PNAS, and Psychological Science.
His work has been awarded numerous distinctions, including the 2024 Rising Star Award (Association for Psychological Science) and the 2025 Jim Sidanius Early Career Award (International Society of Political Psychology), and he is among the ISI top 1% most-cited scientists worldwide.
Last updated: 2026-09-03
Source: Department of Political Science