Bot-Theology: Inviting, Prosperous, and (in)Authentic Community

Or I published a paper in a journal and want you to know about it

I recently published an article on Bots commenting on Christian Music Videos on Youtube and the community that comments on those bot comments in the Journal of Religion, Digital Media and Culture. It can be found here, but you’ll likely not have access: https://brill.com/view/journals/rmdc/aop/article-10.1163-21659214-bja10145/article-10.1163-21659214-bja10145.xml

Please do not buy it thinking that I get money. Researchers do not get money when you buy their articles. Have your college\university buy it as it shows the journal interest, but I can get you a pre-print version for you to read.

You might have better luck here: https://digitalcommons.calvin.edu/calvin_facultypubs/1055/

But to save you from reading 22 pages of academic research, I created a short video showing you the process and results of what I found

Here’s the transcript:

I’m Dr. Daniel Jesse, a researcher of praise and worship music, looking especially at emotional formation that takes place around the worship services. And one of the challenges that we face as researchers is trying to figure out what is popular in churches, what’s actually being sung and where those songs are being sourced from.

So we have a couple of avenues that we look at and usually when I post that I looked at the Christian Copyright Licensing International data, which is the storehouse of licensing information that churches use. I get the feedback that that’s not the songs they sing, so in trying to look at where maybe some of these songs that people sing in the church are coming from, I decided to look at YouTube and see what songs are there and I noticed something kind of unique.

Going on in the YouTube comments as I was reading through them, I was looking for stuff like, oh, we’ve seen this in our church or something like that. But I found comments that were being often repeated by different posters and so I started looking down that rabbit hole.

And I wanted to share with you this phenomenon because you can kind of do this experiment at home. So if you load up YouTube and you look at just about any Christian music video. It depends on the popularity. Like looking at like a Forrest Frank, I don’t see it as often, but like this Lauren Daigle song has this phenomenon happening all the time.

So I’m gonna quick make sure that it’s muted and I’m gonna show you kind of what I saw. So as I scroll into the comments, I see that, you know, there’s the official comment and then the usual like, hey, who’s here around, who’s listening at this time?

Those types of comments. And then as we go through, we start to see kind of these testimonies of faith. I have stage 4 lung cancer, true story, you know. In the hospital, woke up into the song, 13 and the other one believes in God, drug addict. And I started to go, this is kind of interesting. I wonder why these people are posting this here. And so as I scrolled through, I started to notice a couple of other things.

Like, here’s a good example. I was paralyzed in bed last year and I heard Jesus say out loud to me. If you believe in me, get up and I got up and walked. But I noticed that there was this.

Odd at worship songs, use your name, which is a little different than like something that’s kind of related to a name up here. So I started poking around and I noticed that these like this one is a bot that is posting.

So if we open up their channel, you’ll see that they are posting a bunch of hour and a half to hour compilations of worship songs.

Quite popular ones that they don’t own, but they’re just grabbing from here on YouTube and are reposting and putting together into a compilation. Some of these only have like 30 views.

But we noticed that like this one has 167,000 views.

So it made me start to think, are they using bots to post comments that are then leading to their channels?

And yes, that is what is happening. You see this has 299 million views and that shows kind of why they’re doing it because they get the engagement, they get the clicks over and then they can monetize. So as we’re going through, we can see that comments like these are popping up all over the place.

And you can do this on your own. You can go to YouTube, look up almost any worship song and and find these. So when I was looking at the comments below, I noticed that like people were rejoicing. They were using it as a way to worship God, calling it a miracle, really getting into.

All of these treating these comments that the bot appears baking as real.

And you will see as you go through that there will be more and more of them and we know that the comment is real. Let me quickly show that.

When they notice this, they mentioned the song. So like this comment that says this song you say not gonna be a bot comment. Anything that has specificity is probably not going to be a bot comment, but anything that’s vague is probably going to be a bot comment, and especially when it has a name, a username like latest Christian gospel.

Right. And we go over to their page, we see that, Yep, here we have it, live streams, videos, right? And usually they’re not super well engaged, but often you have something like this where you have 30 million views over here. Sometimes if we go to that video, sometimes we can get a little bit meta and we’ll see in the comments. We’ll see some of these bots working like that might be a bot.

But some of them are fully engaged. Amen. Amen. You know, thank you, right? And you see these spots again, kind of worshiping.

Kind of on each other, commenting and creating like bots talking to bots, but what I found super interesting is that.

The theology that these bots are using are designed to be kind of inviting testimonials that share the power of God and the power of God to overcome adverse circumstances.

So you have something like I have stage 4 lung cancer. It moved. You know, I’m just praying to God that it would that God would take this away. And you have people saying, I pray for healing, I pray healing. He has you and I believe that these people who are replying are being very sincere in their their replies, right? Very much a prayer that you would hear in a church that believes in healing right here of.

I proclaim the power of God’s love over you. So you see kind of that.

That movement of engagement.

Yeah, right here. I hereby proclaim the power of Jesus Christ and healing over your life, right? Like if you go to a very charismatic Pentecostal-ish church, you’ll hear something like that.

So the paper I wrote and just had published is about this phenomenon and looking at how there’s kind of a inauthentic and authentic community being formed here. There are these bots who are posting in order to get views, and then there are people who are posting on the bot comments that are fully engaged and locked in and treating those bots as real to have the kind of connection there.

And I’m just wondering kind of why that happens. Unfortunately, due to YouTube controls, I cannot reach out to these people who are commenting or making the bots.

I don’t know. What do you think? What do you? Why do you think people are building this sort of community on YouTube? We know that the bots are there to try to make money.

But we know we can. We can say that the people are there to connect with others and share the love of God.

But there’s something kind of kind of weird going on here. Anyways, I just thought that was interesting and wanted to share. There is a link to my paper on my sub stack. It’s not Open Access unfortunately, but just send me an e-mail if you really want to slog through the 22 pages of research and comments. One further thing it was interesting if you go to non Christian or worship songs, you really won’t see this type of behavior happening. Bots might post, but they’re gonna be much more direct in their marketing. Come check out my music, something like that.

And they’re not going to get that kind of communal response to them. I only found a couple of.

More what we call secular songs that had that going on inside of them. Anyways, thanks for listening. Have a good day.

We’ll catch you later.

So, what we see is that people are posting comments to bring others to their videos so that they can get money from the engagement. That’s not weird for the online world. What is odd is that the community accepts these bots as real and engages with praise and worship. As I conclude my journal article:

My research has been centered on a theological interpretation of interactions within YouTube comment sections, paying particular attention to the concept of bot theology. Further investigations could explore the reasons why people engage with comments as they do, setting aside the need to interpret ideological biases. A plausible explanation for the observed behavior might be that Christians are seeking diverse channels through which they can express and practice their faith outside of church settings, as Roof suggests. (Roof, 2001) The YouTube comment section represents one such channel where the authenticity of the commenter is less relevant than the ideological resonance with the content of the post. It would be wise for leaders of church communities to recognize their congregation’s need for fellowship and worship, ensuring that opportunities for collective prayer, expressions of thanks, supplications, and grief are available. Focus should go beyond the mere detection of insincere elements like bots to establishing moments, spaces, and safe contexts conducive to worship.