As more people like you and me operate on social media accounts, social media bots or socialbots as they are known as. Are also going to operate more frequently. A socialbot is a software application that automatically interacts in social media sites by imitating human behavior. This simply means that you could be interacting with a social media bot when you think it is a human that you are interacting with. 7% of all Twitter users are believed to socialbots.
Why are social media bots created?
Social media bots are created with a specific purpose in mind. There are organizations that use these applications for public relations, marketing and various forms of marketing. The biggest example is that of Carina Santos, a faux journalist created at the Federal University of Ouro Preto, Brazil, that outranked even Oprah Winfrey on Twitter. But they are also used for unethical purposes. And if you are a victim, there is going to be trouble.
How are you harmed by socialbots?
Social media bots can harm your computer and slow it down. Worse, they can steal your personal data and there can be nothing worse than this. But the worst part of being infected by a socialbot is that you unknowingly become part of a network that works to hack into government websites and crash them.
How to detect social media bots?Â
Facebook has a lesser number of socialbots than Twitter because it is not easy to create a bot account in Facebook. However, socialbots exist in these sites and also on other sites including MySpace.
Facebook social media bots can be identified by some typical behaviors. For instance, when you see one of your contacts displaying spam content and encouraging you to visit the bot website to view it. Braggers are Facebook and Twitter socialbots that post messages on your status updates and tweets. However, someone visiting your page will not be able to see these messages. Poster bots, however, post messages on your Facebook wall and they can be seen by your friends. And when you get those frequent private messages from one or more of your “so-called†friends, you can more or less ascertain that these are bot messages.
How to detect Twitter socialbots?
Because Twitter has more bots than Facebook, you need to focus more on identifying Twitter social media bots. Socialbots on Twitter can be seen following hundreds and thousands of users. These bots also almost instantly reply to your tweets, even before you have yourself read your tweet.
Photo cred: Bruno Cordioli
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