How Advanced Socialbots Have Infiltrated Twitter - MIT Technology Review

It's already happening...

I write about it in a fictional sense in my novel, The Social Event, but it appears truth imitates fiction. 

"...If you have a Twitter account, the chances are that you have fewer than 50 followers and that you follow fewer than 50 people yourself. You probably know many of these people well but there may also be a few on your list who you’ve never met.

So here’s an interesting question: how do you know these Twitter users are real people and not automated accounts, known as bots, that are feeding you links and messages designed to sway your opinions?"

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"...The bots generate tweets either by reposting messages that others have posted or by creating their own synthetic tweets using a set of rules to pick out common words on a certain topic and put them together into a sentence."

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"...More surprisingly, the socialbots that generated synthetic tweets (rather than just reposting) performed better too. That suggests that Twitter users are unable to distinguish between posts generated by humans and by bots. “This is possibly because a large fraction of tweets in Twitter are written in an informal, grammatically incoherent style, so that even simple statistical models can produce tweets with quality similar to those posted by humans in Twitter,” suggest Freitas and co."

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"...The worry is that automated bots could be designed to significantly influence opinion in one or more of these areas. For example, it would be relatively straightforward to create a bot that spreads false rumors about a political candidate in a way that could influence an election.

So the work of Freitas and co is a wake-up call for Twitter. If it wants to successfully prevent these kinds of attacks, it will need to significantly improve its defense mechanisms. And since this work reveals what makes bots successful, Twitter’s research team has an advantage.

The trick will be to spot social bots and exclude them without mistakenly excluding human users in the process. That will be no easy task.

But with an estimated 20 million fake Twitter accounts already set up, Twitter’s researchers have plenty of data to work with."


Read the entire article at MIT Technology Review. 

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