Social bot

A social bot (also: socialbot or socbot) is a particular type of chatterbot that is employed in social media networks to automatically generate messages (e.g. tweets) or in general advocate certain ideas, support campaigns, and public relations either by acting as a "follower" or even as a fake account that gathers followers itself. In this respect, social bots can be said to have passed the Turing test. Social bots appear to have played a significant role in the United States presidential election, 2016 and their history appears to go back at least to the United States midterm elections, 2010. Twitterbots are already well-known examples, but corresponding autonomous agents on Facebook and elsewhere have also been observed. Nowadays, social bots can generate convincing internet personas that are well capable of influencing real people.

Social bots, besides being able to produce messages autonomously, also share many traits with spambots with respect to their tendency to infiltrate large user groups.

Unless strict regulations on their use are passed, socialbots are expected to play a major role in future shaping of public opinion by autonomously acting as incessant and never-tiring influencers.

Lutz Finger identifies 5 immediate uses for social bots:

The effects of all points can be likened to and support methods of traditional psychological warfare.

The first generation of bots could sometimes be distinguished from real users by their often superhuman capacities to post messages around the clock (and at massive rates). Later developments have succeeded in imprinting more "human" activity and behavioural patterns in the agent. To unambiguously detect social bots as what they are, a variety of criteria must be applied together using pattern detection techniques, some of which are:

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