Tag: Social Bots

Social Bots are automated social media accounts mimicking humans. Social bots are actively used for both beneficial and nefarious purposes.

Social Bots coexist with humans since the early days of online social networks. Yet, we still lack a precise and well-agreed definition of what a social bot is. This is partly due to the multiple communities studying them and to the multifaceted and dynamic behavior of these entities, resulting in diverse definitions each focusing on different characteristics. Computer scientists and engineers tend to define bots from a technical perspective, focusing on features such as activity levels, complete or partial automation, use of algorithms and AI. The existence of accounts that are simultaneously driven by algorithms and by human intervention led to even more fine-grained definitions and cyborgs were introduced as either bot-assisted humans or human-assisted bots. Instead, social scientists are typically more interested in the social or political implications of the use of bots and define them accordingly.
—CACM, “A Decade of Social Bot Detection”

A Social Bot (also: socialbot or socbot) or troll bot is an agent that communicates more or less autonomously on social media, often with the task of influencing the course of discussion and/or the opinions of its readers. It is related to chatbots but mostly only uses rather simple interactions or no reactivity at all. The messages (e.g. tweets) it distributes are mostly either very simple, or prefabricated (by humans), and it often operates in groups and various configurations of partial human control (hybrid). It usually targets advocating certain ideas, supporting campaigns, or aggregating other sources either by acting as a “follower” and/or gathering followers itself. In this very limited respect, social bots can be said to have passed the Turing test. If social media profiles are expected to be human, then social bots represent fake accounts. The automated creation and deployment of many social bots against a distributed system or community is one form of Sybil attack.
—Wikipedia, “Social bot”