Is it time consuming? Does someone create a hundred profiles a day?
How does a bot respond to comments or post media?
In: Technology
All modern social media websites have two broad components – front-end code that runs on your device (like an app that you download) and back-end code that runs on their devices (their giant server rooms).
In order to allow communication between these two blocks of code, websites will usually have something called APIs, or Application Programming Interface, that lets you send messages between them freely. You can actually open Google Chrome, right click on any page and click “Inspect”, and switch to the “Network” tab and see the messages being sent between the front-end and the back-end.
What this means, however, is that you can write your own code and interact with the back-end directly, without having to go through the front-end. You see the new message in the “Network” tab when you type a new comment and click “Enter”? You can simulate it and re-run it millions of times if you have control of the messages being sent.
Why would people make these? Scams, most often. Cast a wide net, see who replies, sucker them in. Sometimes it’s just an idiot student working on a project. You can have bots sending canned replies from an existing set of answers to seem more realistic. Anything you want, really.
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