
A spambot became the second most powerful member of an Italian social network - avyfain
http://www.technologyreview.com/view/529696/how-a-simple-spambot-became-the-second-most-powerful-member-of-an-italian-social-network/
======
tedunangst
_But the targeted recommendations given to followers were far more effective
than those given to non-followers. “In other words, lajello has a greater
persuasive power over those who are more aware of its presence and activity,”
say Aiello and co._

This seems to be the main measure of the bot's "power", but I'm not sure it's
that surprising. What they found is that people already predisposed to linking
with random yahoos they don't know (e.g., the bot) are also inclined to link
with more random yahoos they don't know. I'm not convinced that demonstrates
the persuasive power of the bot so much as that some people will merrily click
yes in response to any prompt.

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coldcode
Sadly this might be future of most of the social web, robots attracting
robots.

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chatmasta
I suspect there is an opportunity in working on the other side of this
equation, providing a service to identify suspected spam accounts. You could
either charge for access to the list, or publish it as a public service, in
the same way that abusive IP addresses are published.

You could identify spam accounts in a few ways. A naiive, but probably
effective approach, would be buying the "fake follower" services yourself on
places like Fiverr [1]. But that would cost a lot of money quickly. A more
sustainable solution would be applying any number of machine learning
techniques, which have been shown to achieve 80-90% accuracy. apply any number
of machine learning techniques with a fair accuracy. [2]

Personally, I would like to do some research into this area. I would assume
you could get pretty far just by graphing the networks of accounts, and
comparing the shape of them to authentic accounts.

[1] fiverr.com [2]
[http://scholar.google.com/scholar?as_ylo=2013&q=fake+twitter...](http://scholar.google.com/scholar?as_ylo=2013&q=fake+twitter+account&hl=en&as_sdt=0,5)

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guelo
I thought this was common knowledge for social marketers, following everyone
you can gains you followers.

~~~
cm2012
The bot didn't follow people - it just visited their profiles.

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mherrmann
Funny - I am just developing a Chrome extension that harnesses precisely this:
[https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/livisitor/pafjcmmf...](https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/livisitor/pafjcmmfiibiahjeiipbnmaaggjicnme?authuser=0)
Please don't share the link yet, it's still in beta.

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MasterScrat
There should be a browser extension that finds all references to social
profiles on the page you are visiting, and that displays a warning if any of
them is suspected to be a bot.

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kome
The social network cited by the article, Anobii
([http://www.anobii.com](http://www.anobii.com)), is like GoodReads but
perhaps older (2006).

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EGreg
One of my biggest fears about technology is how quickly and tirelessly
machines can do things that, until now, we've expected limitations on.

For example, if I exceed the speed limit on a highway for just 5 seconds, I
doubt anyone would notice. In fact, the law enforcement is pretty vague about
speed limits at the moment.

If I leave my car in a parking lot for a minute without paying, I rely on the
fact that a human watching isn't going to be that super efficient as to give
me a ticket right away.

But that's only the beginning. There is so much information that a computer
network can cross correlate about everyone, including probabilistic
assessments about their identity, etc. This can of course be used by
businesses
([http://www.forbes.com/fdc/welcome_mjx.shtml](http://www.forbes.com/fdc/welcome_mjx.shtml))
or governments to try to do pre-crime
([http://www.theverge.com/2014/2/19/5419854/the-minority-
repor...](http://www.theverge.com/2014/2/19/5419854/the-minority-report-this-
computer-predicts-crime-but-is-it-racist)).

But again, this is just the beginning. Right now we have a certain threshold
for the quality of evidence against someone in a courtroom. With computers
being able to come up with dozens of plausible "stories that will stick",
anyone can be threatened as the jury (at least in the first few years) won't
be able to tell the difference. We already have
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parallel_construction](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parallel_construction)
providing admissible evidence in court. With big-data software more
sophisticated than [https://www.palantir.com/](https://www.palantir.com/) ,
those with the machines on their side will have powerful legal weapons that
they can wield against anyone.

But even this is just the beginning. We expect a certain quality of output
from humans in all areas of life. Being able to match and surpass human output
is one thing ([http://www.popsci.com/article/technology/algorithm-
recognize...](http://www.popsci.com/article/technology/algorithm-recognizes-
faces-better-people-can)) ... but the relentless ability to continually search
through a space towards a goal, and instantaneously leverage gains to produce
more gains, may begin to overcome any strategic human systems, whether by
individuals or entire countries. A computer network could figure out how to
infiltrate a social network, topple a regime, completely dilute everyone's
trust even in one another, and so forth. The smarter computers get, the more
they will be able to overcome the systems we've set up including the
biological systems of morality and trust from hundreds of thousands of years
of evolution.

In fact if you think this is fantasy, consider that the NSA and other agencies
already have rudimentary versions of this, that can only be made more powerful
with big data crunching and bots:
[https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20140224/17054826340/new-s...](https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20140224/17054826340/new-
snowden-doc-reveals-how-gchqnsa-use-internet-to-manipulate-deceive-destroy-
reputations.shtml)

So what's next for us as a species?

~~~
brey
Agreed. Related to this, there's a school of thought which says the ability
for us to break laws which don't yet reflect updated social mores is key to
preventing society stagnating, to force change in those laws.

Let's suppose 1960s civil rights campaigners had had their protests and civil
disobedience clamped down on with the ruthless efficiency of what you could
imagine policing becoming in a few decades -- if the firehose-wielding cops
had also been able to know with perfect intelligence who was planning to break
the law, and had been able to easily crush any nascent rebellion against the
laws of the time, which we now recognise to be wrong. How easily would we have
seen change under those circumstances?

~~~
JoeAltmaier
By voting? Civil disobedience isn't the only path to changing laws; it just
speeds it up sometimes.

~~~
vdaniuk
Voting is playing by the rules of the system. The world is changing too fast
now to use that a reliable strategy.

~~~
JoeAltmaier
Civil disobedience doesn't do anything permanent, unless it results in changes
in law.

~~~
EGreg
The issue here is the rules of a human system are in danger of being subverted
by people wielding massive computing power.

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bjliu
This is a case study but it would be fascinating to see the results in other
social networks too.

~~~
avyfain
I believe the problem is that most social networks don't notify you when
someone visits your profile. The only one I can think of that does that is
LinkedIn, and there you have to pay for a premium account to have the
information. Also not sure if their API allows you to pull that easily.

~~~
stephancoral
OKCupid has the option of notifying when someone visits your profile.

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personZ
Related, albeit of a different nature, a pretty classic LinkedIn tactic now
are connection requests seemingly from relatively attractive young women (at
least when targeting men. A similar ruse is using age-correlated female from
names when sending mass mailings -- instead of being from "Widget Co
Promotions", it's from Brittney @ Widget Co).

Moments ago I followed one connection request I was sent, trying to find how I
knew this person, to what was clearly a fake company with dozens of these
"employees" \-- all 20-ish, attractive women[1] with cloned profiles and fake
backstories, to be shocked to find that many of them shared connections with
me -- people I knew accepted the connection request because...attractive
person. And this likely bot keeps crawling through the social graph building
its master corpus of relationships.

To make it even more humorous, many of these fake profiles had various skills
endorsed by seemingly real people. So not only did people connect with fake
people on a picture, they felt the need to endorse them as well, earning their
imaginary trust. Who knows...maybe it'll be the start of a crazy internet
romance? Man and virtual bot.

[1] An interesting correlation would be determining someone's "type" from
their online profiles, optimizing the success rate of the connection. Do they
like the big haired blond? Maybe the petite Asian? How about the short-cropped
strong-faced woman? A penchant for red heads?

~~~
eli
> "people I knew accepted the connection request because...attractive person"

Or they just accept everyone. I did that for years.

~~~
personZ
For sure, that plays a part as well, but for those who are more discerning I
think this does add to to the probability of acceptance.

LinkedIn is a tool that reveals far more information than people imagine. I
recently un-connected from some old peers because we are now effectively in
competition with each other, and it felt dirty seeing connection notifications
for them and knowing (later confirmed), companies they were targeting,
strategies they were pursuing, etc. Not only did I not want to benefit from
that, in reverse I realized the same could be seen from my activities, when
clients I was soliciting would connect with me on our first engagement, etc.

In the LinkedIn world, Bud Fox wouldn't have had to follow Wildman around to
determine that he was interested in Anacott Steel -- he could simply watch as
his M&A team connected with the Anacott Steel executive, etc.

~~~
mahyarm
If you don't treat linked in as a public resume your doing it wrong. You
should only put information there that anybody including competitors could
look up quickly.

~~~
roc
"doing it wrong" sums up how most people use most software.

