User:Bulaaf/Social bot

A social bot is an agent that communicates autonomously on social media. It is related to chatbots but mostly only uses rather simple interactions or no reactivity at all. The messages (e.g. tweets) it distributes can be simple and operate in groups and various configurations with partial human control (hybrid). Social bots can also use artificial intelligence to express messages in more natural human dialogue.

Uses:

 * Companies can use the social bot to act as a low cost customer service agent to answer questions that their users might have.
 * User can setup automatic answers for commonly asked questions on Social media such as Discord.
 * To influence peoples decisions, EX: advertise a product, support a political campaign, increase engagement statistics for social media pages Etc.

History:
Social bots, besides being able to (re-)produce or reuse messages autonomously, also share many traits with spambots with respect to their tendency to infiltrate large user groups.

Twitterbots are already well-known examples, but corresponding autonomous agents on Facebook and elsewhere have also been observed. Nowadays, social bots are equipped with or can generate convincing internet personas that are well capable of influencing real people.

Using social bots is against the terms of service of many platforms, such as Twitter and Instagram, although it is allowed to some degree by others, such as Reddit and Discord. Even for social media platforms that restrict social bots, a certain degree of automation is of course intended by making social media APIs available. Social media platforms have also developed their own automated tools to filter out messages that come from bots, although they are not advanced enough to detect all bot messages.

The topic of a legal regulation of social bots is becoming more urgent to policy makers in many countries, however due to the difficulty of recognizing social bots and separating them from "eligible" automation via social media APIs, it is currently unclear how that can be done and also if it can be enforced. In any case, social bots are expected to play a role in future shaping of public opinion by autonomously acting as incessant and never-tiring influencer.

Russian disinformation campaigns:

Social bots have been used by the Russian government in spreading misinformation to destabilize the west, weaken Nato allies and more. In 2014 Russia used social bots to spread misinformation about its invasion of Crimea and in 2022 it did the same when invading Ukraine to try and convince people that the invasion was for the good of the Ukrainian people.

Boston marathon Bombings:

Social Bots have were used in early detection of critical events such as the Boston Marathon bombings, although unverified sharing of information with others did diminish the over positive of their use.

2016 U.S presidential election:
Social bots appear to have played a significant role in the 2016 United States presidential election and their history appears to go back at least to the United States midterm elections, 2010. It is estimated that 9-15% of active Twitter accounts may be social bots and that 15% of the total Twitter population active in the US presidential election discussion were bots. At least 400,000 bots were responsible for about 3.8 million tweets, roughly 19% of the total volume.

Sources:

 * https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/2056305120939264 - Demystifying Social bots
 * https://cacm.acm.org/magazines/2016/7/204021-the-rise-of-social-bots/fulltext[2]
 * https://scholar.smu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1019&context=datasciencereview - bot detection [1]
 * https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/02/14/social-media-is-key-battleground-russia-ukraine-standoff/[3]
 * https://dl.acm.org/doi/abs/10.1145/2818717 - Rise of Social bots
 * https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2982233 - 2016 presidential election
 * https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/eufm.12245 - Social media bots and stock markets