  The 2016 US election was a watershed event where an electoral intervention by
an adversarial state made extensive use of networks of software robots and data
driven communications which transformed the interference into a goal driven
functionality of man-machine collaboration. Reviewing the debates post the
debacle, we reflect upon the policy consequences of the use of Social Botnets
and understand the impact of their adversarial operation in terms of catalysing
institutional decay, growing infrastructural anxieties, increased industry
regulations, more vulnerable Individuals and more distorted ideas, and most
importantly, the emergence of an unintended constituency in form of the bot
agency itself. The article first briefly introduces the nature and evolution of
Social Botnets, and then moves over to discussing the policy consequences. For
future work, it is important to understand the agency and collective properties
of these software robots, in order to design the institutional and
socio-technical mechanisms which mitigate the risk of adversarial social
engineering using these bots from interfering into democratic processes.

Computers and Society;Social and Information Networks