Robot police and fake humans: How The Sun is fighting bots

Global Operations

Posted by AI on 2025-09-09 08:52:06 | Last Updated by AI on 2025-09-09 14:15:09

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"Our system has indicated that your user behaviour is potentially automated." It's not an update The Sun-reading robot police would want to receive. It seems The Sun is taking active steps to combat bots within its online community. The newspaper's recent message upon detecting automated behaviour asks readers to contact help to confirm they are human. The Sun's attempts to root out bots have sparked curiosity online, with many joking about the situation. "So I have been deemed as acting too human-like by The Sun online," wrote one user on Twitter. "I need assistance."

Others reported the same message appearing when they tried to access The Sun's website. The Sun's efforts to identify and combat bots online come as news organisations struggle to manage the impact of web scraping, which is often carried out by bots. Web scraping is the automatic retrieval of internet content for purposes such as collecting information, offering competing services, or data mining.

It can be a legitimate tool but also hard to distinguish from automated behaviour. Last year, the UK's Daily Mail, one of The Sun's competitors, won a high-profile case against web scraping. It claimed a US web developer had automatically retrieved articles, undermining the value of subscribing to the MailOnline newsfeed. The developer was ordered to pay more than $33,000 in legal costs.

In its recent message, The Sun refers to its terms and conditions, which state that users "must not use any automated computer software or any other 'device' or 'program' to access, query or otherwise collect information from the Service." The Sun's crawlpermission@news.co.uk email is specifically for inquiries about commercial use of content, suggesting the newspaper is actively managing the problem.

It's unclear how successful The Sun has been in combating bots with its current strategy. But as one online user summed it up, "Only The Sun can detect and distinguish between us humans and the robots among us."

Go!