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How Advanced Socialbots Have Infiltrated Twitter

26 points by ca98am79 12y ago

xux 12y ago
>While male and female bots were equally effective when considered overall, female social bots were much more effective at generating followers among the group of socially connected software developers. This is hilarious, because we can all guess why.
dang 12y ago
The paper is at http://arxiv.org/abs/1405.4927 http://arxiv.org/abs/1405.4927. The blog post adds a little context, though, so I guess we won't change the url.
opendais 12y ago
I, for one, welcome our new Socialbot Overlords.
- Irene 12y ago
  Yes, digital is powerful. Another example: In March, two students at the Technion in Israel created a swarm of bots that caused a phony traffic jam on Waze/Google Maps. Another reference: "What We Should Do Before the Social Bots Take Over" http://web.mit.edu/sts/Graeff.pdf http://web.mit.edu/sts/Graeff.pdf
voyou 12y ago
Researchers create bot that poses as Twitter user and automatically follows other users at random, are surprised that other Twitter users automatically follow their bot at random. (I've only skimmed the paper, so I may have missed it, but they don't seem to take any measures to check whether their bot tricks actual people into engaging with it, or whether the apparent engagement is just the effect of other bots working at random.)
- jkirch 12y ago
  I've got a Twitter bot whose sole purpose is to send links from reddit to Twitter - it gets a lot of replies from people confusing the bot with the human(?) Redditors - often when the bot posts conflicting "personal" information.
  - sciguy77 12y ago
    That's interesting. Can you tell us more about the project and its motivations?
notahacker 12y ago
So Turing's test is apparently passed not because of advances in AI, but because humanity embraces a communication medium restricting their capacity to express themselves (and encouraging mindless meme-repetition and irrelevant asides) to the point where it's barely distinguishable from the output of even fairly trivial scripts. #whocares #justinbieber t.co/catpic
greatdox 12y ago
My friend's sister debugged a Twitter bot for Python. https://gist.github.com/ErisBlastar/6144424 https://gist.github.com/ErisBlastar/6144424 The original was very buggy and did not even support Unicode and error-ed out and crashed. Using the #ebook hashtag it favors tweets with it in it, getting a lot of indie authors to follow her account on Twitter. She can only do 100 favorings at a time due to limits, but it seems to work. She uses favorings due to the British spelling. You have to get a Twitter API account with the keys, install the Twitter library for Python 2.7 and fill in the foo and bar etc stuff with your special API keys, and it works. Someone else did the Python 3.X version, you can find it at Github Gists. https://gist.github.com/jmoz/6135716 https://gist.github.com/jmoz/6135716

26 points by ca98am79 12y ago

xux 12y ago

>While male and female bots were equally effective when considered overall, female social bots were much more effective at generating followers among the group of socially connected software developers. This is hilarious, because we can all guess why.

dang 12y ago

The paper is at http://arxiv.org/abs/1405.4927 http://arxiv.org/abs/1405.4927. The blog post adds a little context, though, so I guess we won't change the url.

opendais 12y ago

I, for one, welcome our new Socialbot Overlords.

Irene 12y ago
Yes, digital is powerful. Another example: In March, two students at the Technion in Israel created a swarm of bots that caused a phony traffic jam on Waze/Google Maps. Another reference: "What We Should Do Before the Social Bots Take Over" http://web.mit.edu/sts/Graeff.pdf http://web.mit.edu/sts/Graeff.pdf

voyou 12y ago

Researchers create bot that poses as Twitter user and automatically follows other users at random, are surprised that other Twitter users automatically follow their bot at random. (I've only skimmed the paper, so I may have missed it, but they don't seem to take any measures to check whether their bot tricks actual people into engaging with it, or whether the apparent engagement is just the effect of other bots working at random.)

jkirch 12y ago
I've got a Twitter bot whose sole purpose is to send links from reddit to Twitter - it gets a lot of replies from people confusing the bot with the human(?) Redditors - often when the bot posts conflicting "personal" information.
- sciguy77 12y ago
  That's interesting. Can you tell us more about the project and its motivations?

notahacker 12y ago

So Turing's test is apparently passed not because of advances in AI, but because humanity embraces a communication medium restricting their capacity to express themselves (and encouraging mindless meme-repetition and irrelevant asides) to the point where it's barely distinguishable from the output of even fairly trivial scripts. #whocares #justinbieber t.co/catpic

greatdox 12y ago

My friend's sister debugged a Twitter bot for Python. https://gist.github.com/ErisBlastar/6144424 https://gist.github.com/ErisBlastar/6144424 The original was very buggy and did not even support Unicode and error-ed out and crashed. Using the #ebook hashtag it favors tweets with it in it, getting a lot of indie authors to follow her account on Twitter. She can only do 100 favorings at a time due to limits, but it seems to work. She uses favorings due to the British spelling. You have to get a Twitter API account with the keys, install the Twitter library for Python 2.7 and fill in the foo and bar etc stuff with your special API keys, and it works. Someone else did the Python 3.X version, you can find it at Github Gists. https://gist.github.com/jmoz/6135716 https://gist.github.com/jmoz/6135716