treebeard31THREE anonymous teams have let loose software that pretends to be human, and used it to manipulate a group of Twitter users.
Over a two-week period, the three "socialbots" were able to integrate themselves into the group, and gained close to 250 followers between them. They received more than 240 responses to the tweets they sent.
This sinister-sounding effort was in fact part of Socialbots 2011, a competition designed to test whether bots can be used to alter the structure of a social network.
Each team had a Twitter account controlled by a socialbot. Like regular human users, the bot could follow other Twitter users and send messages. Bots were rewarded for the number of followers they amassed and the number of responses their tweets generated.
The socialbots looked at tweets sent by members of a network of Twitter users who shared a particular interest, and then generated a suitable response. In one exchange a bot asks a human user which character they would like to bring back to life from their favourite book. When the human replies "Jesus" it responds: "Honestly? no fracking way. ahahahhaa."
Interactions like this were realistic enough to attract attention from members of the targeted community, who started to follow the bots and respond to their messages. The best-performing bot was able to gain more than 100 followers and generated almost 200 responses. {Read on}
