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
Machine learning often works by mimicking human behavior, and if there is enough data, they can mimic complex things like language/text. If you wanted to make a bot that mimicked football fans, you would find everyone on a social network that follows football pages/accounts, and teach the bot to mimick the responses that these people write. The bot would very effectively sound like a football fan, but in longer posts or threads it wouldn’t make much sense. You can do the same thing by mimicking trolls or political accounts.
The reason they are able to seem so much like people is that people are imperfect at using language themselves. The bot will mimick all these little mistakes as well, which makes it look like a person. The first chatbots that tricked people into thinking they were real people mimicked young children or people learning English for the first time. It was hard for the people talking to the chatbots to determine if the language mistakes were due to the language barrier, or the fact that it was a computer program.
Humans often tend to give the benefit of the doubt to someone they are talking to, whether that is a scammer or a bot.
Bots that tweet completely random things and don’t really respond to other accounts are often just retweeting or copy-pasting politically charged tweets from other accounts. It can do this by evaluating the response to tweets by looking at what kind of people retweet those things. So these bots appear human because they are literally just copying other humans.
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