Social Media popularity and influence is big business, I checked this morning, I could have purchased 4,000 new followers on Twitter for less that a price of a Costa Coffee and 2,000 friends on Facebook for another £5. The Dark Web is more forthcoming, if I am willing to shell out £3,000, I could have made one million — yes, that 1,000,000 — new friends on Instagram. For an extra £32, 10,000 of them would have liked one of my Cat Photos!
Retweets. Likes. Favorites. Comments. Upvotes. Page views. whichever social metric you use – they are available to buy
However, if I had purchased any of the above, the vast majority of my new friends would certainly live outside the U.K, mostly in India, Bangladesh, Romania and Russia — oh and they would not be not exactly human. They are bots, or lines of code. But they were built to behave like people on social media sites.
Bots have been around for years and they used to be easy to spot. They had random photos for avatars (often of a scantily clad and or duck faced woman), used computer-generated names (like Kelly41844857), and shared absolute nonsense (retweets, reposts or mostly links to pornography sites). But today’s bots have evolved,they have learned to better camouflage their identity, have real-sounding names. They keep human hours for their “country”, stopping activity during the middle of the night and picking up again in the morning. They share photos, laugh out loud — LOL! — and even engage in conversations with each other. And there are millions of them.
These imaginary citizens of the Internet have surprising power, making celebrities, wannabe celebrities and companies seem more popular than they really are, polarising public opinion about culture and products and, in some instances, influencing political agendas. They make up roughly 50 percent of all online traffic. In their simplest form, bots – short for robots – fulfill benign and banal tasks, including, for instance, automatically tweeting the most current news headlines.
There are a number of different ways to build bots. For the non-technical, there are bot management tools – a WYSIWYG type system. One of the most popular bot management tools is a program called Zeus, which sells for £580 and offers a simple dashboard from which you can control your bot army. (In addition to creating social media bots, the program is used for shadier purposes, like identity theft.) More advanced programmers build their own bot farms from scratch.
Bots often carry the hashtags — online road signs for a particular discussion — of viewpoints that their owners actually oppose, to try to confuse people or muffle or redirect discussions.
During the 2012 presidential elections in Mexico, the Institutional Revolutionary Party, or PRI, was accused of using tens of thousands of bots to drown out opposing parties’ messages on Twitter and Facebook. The PRI is to said have employed a little trickery, parsing and twisting language enough to confuse people about what the opposition really meant to say online.
In Turkey, where Twitter was briefly banned not long ago, an investigation found that every political party was controlling bots that were trying to force topics to become trends on social sites that favoured one political ideal over another. The bots would also use a political group’s slogan as a hashtag, with the intent of fooling people into believing it was more popular than it really was.
Political bots come in different shapes: Fake followers mainly bolster the number of online supporters for a politician; bot armies “Twitter-bomb” discussions on certain topics in order to marginalize other viewpoints; and more sophisticated versions will react to certain keywords by starting a debate with others. Where they work the best is in sowing confusion or choking off a political conversation on a global issue that involves an authoritarian government. So bots are quite active in Russia, and part of an overall successful regime strategy to muddy issues and sow misinformation. At the beginning of the Syrian civil war, when journalists and interested publics outside the country were trying to find out what was going on in the country, the regime used bots to flood the #syria hashtag and kill it as a source of information about the resistance.
The U.S. presidetial election was also a prime battleground for bots, Donald Trump’s Twitter game was incredible. His posting frequency would make an RSS feed envious. And each tweet, unlike the dozens of campaign press advisories sent every day, has a significant chance of showing up in the news. But what is most impressive was his ability to conjure thousands of retweets and likes from supporters—on literally anything he says. Take this:
Donald J. Trump ✔ @realDonaldTrump
I will be interviewed on @oreillyfactor at 8:00 P.M. Enjoy!
12:42 AM – 24 May 2016
2,101 2,101 Retweets 9,027 9,027 likes
Trump was notifying his fans that he would appear, in 20 minutes, on a show where he is frequently interviewed. This is normal and expected. And yet more than 2,000 people retweeted this post, and another 9,000 favourited it. That’s not quite Bieber-level, but it’s still pretty good. The New York billionaire is undoubtedly popular. But some have offered a more subtle explanation for Trump’s virality. In April, Patrick Ruffini, a political digital consultant in Alexandria, Virginia, posted a spreadsheet of nearly 500 pro-Trump Twitter accounts that had tweeted, in unison, a message encouraging voters to file FCC complaints against robocalls from the Cruz campaign. Many of these accounts, Ruffini noted, had previously tweeted “17 Marketing Tips for B2B Websites.” They were bots—automated accounts that exist only to extend the social reach of whoever hires them. Twitter subsequently suspended many of them.
Before Twitter’s public stock offering, the company scrubbed millions of bots from the service. Over the years, Google has removed hundreds of millions of video views on YouTube attributed to bots.
There’s an evolutionary process at work where companies have built better spam filters, which has led to better bots, bots act like people by acquiring information from real users, including avatars, pictures and other conversations. With all of these tricks, they appear to “emulate human behaviour. Currently it is not illegal to own a bot, or make them; the legality falls into how people use them. Their use often goes against social media sites’ terms of service.
In March 2016, two students at the Technion, the Israel Institute of Technology, created a swarm of bots that caused a phony traffic jam on Waze, the navigation software owned by Google.
The project, which was a class demonstration, was so sophisticated that the students were able to make bots that imitated Android Mobile phones that accessed fake GPS signals and were operated by fake humans in fake cars. The Waze software, believing that the bots were on the road, started to redirect actual traffic down different streets, even though there was no traffic jam to avoid.
So be careful which whom your are befriending on social media – it’s not just humans to beware of – the bots are out there – trying to influence your spending, your poilitical leanings and your attitudes – or maybe, just maybe it may even try to get you lost.
