
How Advanced Socialbots Have Infiltrated Twitter - ca98am79
http://www.technologyreview.com/view/527746/how-advanced-socialbots-have-infiltrated-twitter/
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notahacker
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

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voyou
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
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
That's interesting. Can you tell us more about the project and its
motivations?

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greatdox
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)

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xux
>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.

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opendais
I, for one, welcome our new Socialbot Overlords.

~~~
Irene
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)

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dang
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.

