The automation of online social life is an urgent issue for researchers and the public alike. However, one of the most significant uses of such technologies seems to have gone largely unnoticed by the research community: religion. Focusing on Islamic Prayer Apps, which automatically post prayers from its users’ accounts, we show that even one such service is already responsible for millions of tweets daily, constituting a significant portion of Arabic-language Twitter traffic. We argue that the fact that a phenomenon of these proportions has gone unnoticed by researchers reveals an opportunity to broaden the scope of the current research agenda on online automation.

中文翻译：

---

Twitter 上的祈祷机器人和宗教崇拜：呼吁制定更广泛的研究议程

在线社交生活的自动化对于研究人员和公众来说都是一个紧迫的问题。然而，研究界似乎基本上没有注意到此类技术最重要的用途之一：宗教。专注于伊斯兰祈祷应用程序，它会自动从其用户的帐户发布祈祷，我们表明即使是这样的服务也已经负责每天数百万条推文，构成阿拉伯语 Twitter 流量的很大一部分。我们认为，研究人员没有注意到这些比例的现象这一事实揭示了扩大当前在线自动化研究议程范围的机会。