
Are You Following a Bot? - taylorbuley
http://m.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2011/05/are-you-following-a-bot/8448/
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gammarator
Seems like there's a potential for a (productive?) arms race here: services
like Twitter or Facebook might (and presumably already do) algorithmically try
to identify fake users. That evolutionary pressure will generate more
sophisticated bots...

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Anon84
Automatic detection of bots and suspicious behavior is part of what we are
trying to do with Truthy

<http://truthy.indiana.edu>

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windsurfer
Sounds like Blade Runner ;)

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RyanMcGreal
You're in a desert walking along in the sand, when all of a sudden you look
down and you see a tortoise.

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ChuckMcM
Could be a real time saver, and of course the definition of a 'bot' can become
squishy as in, "I've got an application that tweets as me for some things."
Technically a bot, useful as an assistant?

A much more interesting question is the believability. For older folks there
seems to be a great willingness to trust what is written on official looking
blogs, whereas my kids naturally distrust such blogs, and yet if the folks
they are following are all in favor of some trend there is a tendency to see
validity in the trend.

Its clearly a more complex subject than I ever gave it credit for before.

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DanielBMarkham
Over the next 10 years I see us leaving the age of the spammer and entering
the age of the bot. By that I mean that bots will become so useful to us that
even when we know they are bots we'll still welcome their company.

Turing should see us now. Cool stuff.

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iwwr
We are already following the bots, Googlebot in particular.

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tomkarlo
Frankly I find dedicated bot accounts less objectionable than human accounts
where a bot or application is inserting paid commercial messages into the
tweet stream, even if they're marked as such. (See adly.com) (Can someone make
their twitter client screen all tweets with #ad?)

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gloob
I haven't used this myself, but it looks like it might be something up your
alley:

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2004254>

<http://proxlet.com/>

My understanding is that it's basically a proxy for Twitter that allows you to
filter based on criteria you specify.

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InclinedPlane
I had the opposite experience. I thought I had been following a bot for a
while but it turned out to be a real person (her name is Anna).

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anonymoushn
For those who are not familiar: <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E7iU0GGVco8>

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rads
"His group has published the code for its experimental bots online, 'to allow
people to be aware of the problem and design countermeasures.'"

The code: [http://www.webecologyproject.org/2011/02/complete-source-
cod...](http://www.webecologyproject.org/2011/02/complete-source-code-from-
socialbots-2011/)

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mrisher
I think part of the issue is, does Twitter consider this a violation? As a
communications platform successor to e-mail, are machine-generated messages
necessarily "bad" simply because they are hijacking a 1:1 channel? And does a
broadcast message violate the spirit of Twitter as a comms platform?

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pier0
Yeah, so true!

