eli5: How do social media “bots” work? Are they like programmed trolls? How do their accounts/comments seem as if they could be a real person’s?
In: Technology
A bot is just a piece of software designed to do the work a human would otherwise do.
A social media bot is a piece of software that interacts with social media so that a human doesn’t have to.
A bot could automate web browser behaviour to do its job and the social media platform can’t do a whole lot to stop it (CAPTCHAs aren’t 100% effective), but social media platforms happily provide ways to access their functionality directly through software code because bots have all kinds of useful purposes, like allowing companies to schedule posts or post to multiple platforms at once.
Of course bots can also be used nefariously, posting spam, sewing discord, spreading a particular political message, trying to scam people etc. And obviously some of these goals can be achieved more effectively if the bot is indistinguishable from a real live human. So the bot could be used in combination with pre-written messages, simple logic to determine what to post and when, what keywords to respond to, and if the developer was really dedicated, even use artificial intelligence to interact (even the best AI isn’t good enough at conversation to fool any reasonable person after more than a couple messages; but then the kind of people that will believe crazy conspiracy theories just because of a single post they read on Facebook, aren’t exactly the most rational people).
The bot might be programmed to perform all sorts of benign actions over weeks, months or even years to cultivate a seemingly authentic account, before it starts doing its intended behaviour, or the developer rents his bot collection to the highest bidder (which is what happens when people “pay for likes”). Or, the bot developer could find/purchase compromised accounts that previously belonged to real people, such things are readily available on the dark web.
It could also be that the bot isn’t a bot at all, but a real person. Maybe they are just really dedicated to a particular ideology. Or perhaps this is their job and they are paid by the state for this work; it’s well known that Russia, China, and sometimes even the USA have used state-backed actors to spread a political message on social media.
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