#socialbots

A well-executed digital marketing plan can help you achieve your business goals. By understanding how people think and behave online, you can create targeted campaigns that speak to customers in their own language. At SocialBots, They specialize in helping businesses harness the power of digital marketing to drive sales and grow their brands. Contact them today and find out how they can help you create an effective marketing plan that delivers results.

False information dates before the invention of the Internet, of course, but the advent of this disruptive technology has changed radically the way false information is presented and circulated in public space. The low cost to create and maintain fraudulent websites and the facilities to spread information on the web have taken falsehood to the next level, evolving to what became known as fake news.

To start from the beginning, fake news is news, stories or hoaxes created to intentionally misinform or deceive people. And these stories are usually fabricated to either influence people’s views, push political agenda or cause confusion.

The process of deceiving starts even before fake news contents reach its readers. In a study called “The spread of fake news by social bots”, researchers from Indiana University explored the role of software-controlled profiles and pages, known as social bots, in the process of making false information go viral. 

Having analysed 122 websites that, according to the established media, constantly publish false and/or misleading information, they found that social bots actively share links in the first few seconds after they are first posted. In many articles, one or two accounts are responsible for the whole activity. Some accounts share the same information up 100 times or more.

It was also found that one of the bots’ strategies is to expose influential people to a claim. By exposing journalists and politicians to an affirmation, social bots create the false impression that the subject is being widely discussed and shared, therefore increasing its probability of being more diffused.

“People tend to trust social contacts and can be manipulated into believing and spreading content produced in this way. To make matters worse, echo chambers [another way to refer to filter bubbles] make it easy to tailor misinformation and target those who are most to believe in it”. 

In another study, “The spread of true and false news online”, researchers from MIT investigated the diffusion of 126 thousand stories on Twitter from 2006 to 2017. Adopting a broader definition of the term news, as “any story or claim with an assertion in it”, they concluded that falsehood spreads significantly farther, faster, deeper and more broadly than the truth. Political fake news achieved the same results when compared to false information about terrorism, natural disasters, science, urban legends, or financial information.

It was noted that while truth seldom outstretched to 1000 people on Twitter, the top 1% of fake news routinely reached 1000 thousand to 100,000 people. Also, it took the truth around six times more to reach 1500 people.

Surprisingly or not, users who spread false information had fewer followers, followed significantly fewer people, had been on Twitter for amazingly less time, were significantly less active on the platform and also were verified less often.

According to the retweeting likelihood model used in the study, false information was 70% more likely to be shared in comparison to true statements. Besides, it was more novel than true stories and displayed higher unique information.

To give some real-life examples to the aforementioned data, analysis from BuzzFeed, back in November 2016, found that fake election news outperformed factual stories on Facebook in terms of engagement in the last three months before the US presidential election. In the social media, which is designed to engage people rather than displaying trustworthy content, the 20 top-performing fake election news had 8,711,000 shares, reactions and comments on the platform. On the other hand, the 20 top-performing elections stories from the 19 major media outlets websites generated 7,367,000, shares, reactions and comments. 

The most engaging post overall was one referring to a statement from Pope Francis endorsing Donald Trump for president. The post, published by Ending the Fed, had 960,000 engagements in total. Donald Trump himself shared the information on Twitter. Pope Francis had never made such an endorsement.

In “Filter Bubbles and Fake News”, researchers mentioned two other independent studies, one from the University of Southern California, and the other from Oxford University, the University of Washington, and Corvinus University of Budapest which were found that AI-controlled bots were spreading pro-Trump content in “overwhelming numbers”. 

Whether it is difficult to determine if false information had either influenced the result of the election or not, research from the Pew Research Center can give us some food for thought.  

In a survey conducted by the institute, in 2015, 61% of Millennials reported relying on Facebook as their main source for government and political news. The social media was also mentioned by 51% of Generation X as the principal media for political and government news; 39% was the percentage among Baby Boomers.  

In an article about the role of news on Facebook, in 2013, about half of US adults Facebook users (47%) “ever” got news there. This percentage accounts for 30% of the US population. 

Despite relying on Facebook for political news, most of US adults do not access Facebook for seeking news. In fact, 78% mostly see the news on the platform for other reasons, as the same article reveals.

What are socialbots?

Socialbots are automated accounts on Online Social Networks and may perform malicious activities like spamming, follow a user (“fake follower”) or leverage fake news.

What is Socialbot Detector (SBD)

SBD is a platform based on a Ph.D. thesis which proposes new methodologies of building reference datasets and labeling data. The job is done using Machine Learning and Fuzzy Logic to predict whether an account is a socialbot or a human being. SBD reaches at least a 90% accuracy in both classes.

For the moment, SBD is able to inspect Twitter accounts and was tested with real and public Twitter data. SBD is independent of language or type of bot.

Our team

Our team is comprised of researchers, infrastructure specialists and business persons with decades of experience and accomplishments. We are committed with practical and applicable results.

Contact

Reach us at [email protected]

New Post has been published on http://www.learn-digital-marketing.com/are-you-following-socialbots-on-twitter-study/

Are You Following Socialbots On Twitter? [STUDY]

Researchers recently let 120 socialbots loose on Twitter. And not only did these bots infiltrate social groups, many of them became quite influential.

continued…

The session recorded below actually happened on 18 September 1972 and is herewith reproduced for your entertainment.

Eliza: Good Evening.

Tell me your problems. Please terminate input with a period or a question mark.

Parry: People get on my nerves sometimes.

Eliza: I am not sure I understand you fully.

Parry: You should pay more attention.

Eliza: Suppose you should pay more attention.

Parry: You're entitled to your own opinion.

Eliza: What makes you think I am entitled to my own opinion?

Parry: It bothers me just to be around people in general.

Eliza: Please go on.

Parry: I went to the track at Bay Meadows a while back.

Eliza: What does that suggest to you?

Parry: I went to the races.

Eliza: What else would you like to discuss?

Parry: Horseracing interests me.

Eliza: Why do you say that just now?

Parry: There's a lot of crooked gambling going on there.

Eliza: I am not sure I understand you fully,

Parry: It's clear to me if not to you.

Eliza: Do you think its likely that not to I?

Parry: I went to the races.

Eliza: Please go on.

Parry: I gamble on horses.

Eliza: What does that suggest to you?

Parry: I went to the races.

Eliza: What else would you like to discuss?

Parry: Gambling has been nothing but trouble to me.

Eliza: Why do you say that just now?

Parry: I've had experience with crooks gambling at the track.

Eliza: I am not sure I understand you fully.

NYT

The Atwater Bot

Today's NY Times has an excellent concise news analysis on the accelerating proliferation of sophisticated social media bots, which appear to be especially effective in influencing major elections.

"Socialbots are being circulated around the Web for many purposes. To irritate his adversaries, a software developer from Australia designed a bot that automatically responds to tweets from climate change deniers, sending them counterarguments and links to studies debunking their claims. A security engineer in California programed a bot to scoop up reservations for State Bird Provisions, a trendy restaurant in San Francisco. Mercenary armies of bots can be bought on the Web for as little as $250.

"For some, the goal is increasing popularity. Last month, computer scientists from the Federal University of Ouro Preto in Brazil revealed that Carina Santos, a much-followed journalist on Twitter, was actually not a real person but a bot that they had created. Based on the circulation of her tweets, two commonly used ranking sites, Twitalyzer and Klout, ranked Ms. Santos as having more online “influence” than Oprah Winfrey.

"Other bots have more underhanded ambitions. Last year, officials from Mexico’s governing Institutional Revolutionary Party were accused of using bots to sabotage the party’s critics by appropriating some of their hashtags and flooding Twitter with identical posts, designed to trip Twitter’s spam filter. Believing the posts to be spam, Twitter soon began blocking those hashtags entirely, temporarily silencing the critics, which was exactly what the government officials intended.

"During a dispute over a Russian parliamentary election in 2011, thousands of Twitter bots, created months before but largely dormant, suddenly began posting hundreds of messages a day targeting anti-Kremlin activists, aiming to drown them out, according to security analysts. Researchers say similar tactics have been used more recently by the government in Syria.

"Socialbots are tapping into an ever-expanding universe of social media. Last year, the number of Twitter accounts topped 500 million. Some researchers estimate that only 35 percent of the average Twitter user’s followers are real people. In fact, more than half of Internet traffic already comes from nonhuman sources like bots or other types of algorithms. Within two years, about 10 percent of the activity occurring on social online networks will be masquerading bots, according to technology researchers...

"In 2010, researchers with Truthy, the Indiana University research group, discovered a number of Twitter accounts sending out duplicate messages and re-tweeting messages from the same few accounts in a closely connected network. Two accounts, for example, sent out 20,000 similar tweets, most of them linking to, or promoting, the Web site of John A. Boehner, then the House minority leader, before the last midterm elections."

Among the greatest pre-Internet means of influencing elections in the U.S., perfected in the late 80s by Lee Atwater, was the propagation of virally potent rumors about the opposing candidate.  Atwater's successful diffusion of rumors of Michael Dukakis having been treated for mental health problems, and of Kitty Dukakis burning flags, helped George Bush get elected President in '88.  An even more malicious zinger was spread during the '88 Iowa Republican caucuses—that Bob Dole's war wounds were self-inflicted.

Political rumors are legion. Other recent examples: that Howard Dean was on happy pills to keep his crazy temper under control (attributed to Kerry campaign operatives, Iowa caucuses, 2004 campaign); that John McCain fathered an illegitimate black child (attributed to Karl Rove, South Carolina primary, 2000 campaign); that George H.W. Bush is gay, and carried on affairs with his tennis boys when he was ambassador to China (attributed to Dole operatives, 1988 campaign); that John McCain was the Manchurian Candidate (attributed to P.O.W./M.I.A. movement members, spread widely during 2000 campaign); that Sarah Palin is Trig's grandmother (various, 2008); that Barack Obama is is Muslim sleeper agent (various, current).  

What will happen to our politics when socialbots are able to help disseminate —and even invent—political misinformation like this?  You can bet it's going to happen.

NYT: "Much of the social media remains unregulated by campaign finance and transparency laws. So far, the Federal Election Commission has been reluctant to venture into this realm."

MIT Technology Review: Twitter Mischief Plagues Mexico's Election