How Advanced Socialbots Have Infiltrated Twitter | MIT Technology Review

A "socialbot" snapshot

"The worry is that automated bots could be designed to significantly influence opinion in one or more of these areas. For example, it would be relatively straightforward to create a bot that spreads false rumors about a political candidate in a way that could influence an election.

So the work of Freitas and co is a wake-up call for Twitter. If it wants to successfully prevent these kinds of attacks, it will need to significantly improve its defense mechanisms. And since this work reveals what makes bots successful, Twitter’s research team has an advantage.

The trick will be to spot social bots and exclude them without mistakenly excluding human users in the process. That will be no easy task.

But with an estimated 20 million fake Twitter accounts already set up, Twitter’s researchers have plenty of data to work with."

How Advanced Socialbots Have Infiltrated Twitter | MIT Technology Review