Are You Following a Bot?
Can one person controlling an identity, or a group of identities, really shape social architecture? Actually, yes. The Web Ecology Project’s analysis of 2009’s post-election protests in Iran revealed that only a handful of people accounted for most of the Twitter activity there. The attempt to steer large social groups toward a particular behavior or cause has long been the province of lobbyists, whose “astroturfing” seeks to camouflage their campaigns as genuine grassroots efforts, and company employees who pose on Internet message boards as unbiased consumers to tout their products. But social bots introduce new scale: they run off a server at practically no cost, and can reach thousands of people. The details that people reveal about their lives, in freely searchable tweets and blogs, offer bots a trove of personal information to work with. “The data coming off social networks allows for more-targeted social ‘hacks’ than ever before,” says Tim Hwang, the director emeritus of the Web Ecology Project. And these hacks use “not just your interests, but your behavior.”
(When I think of robots, I tend to think of awesome ones, like Optimus Prime. In Twitter's case, though, it's more like Wheelie, the Jar-Jar Binks of the old Transformers cartoon*. And isn't it sad when we aren't quite sure if we're talking to a bot?)
What does Jabberwacky have to say about this?
Scarlet: What do you think about libraries?
Jabberwacky: What has that got to do with the name Nicole?
Scarlet: There are probably people named Nicole working in libraries.
Jabberwacky: You aren't very good with these questions.
Scarlet: You aren't very good with these answers.
Jabberwacky: Cleverbot, why are you being so mean to me?
Scarlet: I'm leaving now.
Jabberwacky: Not until I say you can.
Scarlet: Watch me, Wheelie.
Jabberwacky: No. You're not going anywhere, lucas.
...and then I left.
* He was apparently better in the comic.
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