Social media channels mostly are introducing to us a new form of bot – social bots. It might not sound like a big deal or a problem to face in the nearest future. With the rise of bots, it becomes difficult to detect who is real and who is not.
It might shock you to believe that about 50% of all web traffic is not from humans. If they not from a human who then makes up the traffic – the answer is – Robotic programs, also known as “bots” have roamed the internet since its inception.
They can nearly do everything, bots can send emails, monitor forums, use pop-ups to scam you into clicking to a link and lot more.
What is Social Bots?
Bots are the social agent that communicates more or less autonomously on social media platforms, mainly with the aim of influencing the course of the discussion of its readers, though related to chatbots the difference is that it doesn’t react to discussion mostly nor interact back to the user.
How Social Bots Works
The messages bots distributes like twitter bot are very simple, or most times prefabricated by humans, and it often operates in groups and various configurations of partial human control (hybrid). It usually targets advocating certain ideas, supporting campaigns, or aggregating other sources either by acting as a “follower” and/or gathering followers itself.
Social bots on Twitter, for instance, have built-in databases of current events and can recognize the language. The language it can recognize is used to form sentences that are relevant to current topics.
The most interesting thing is that they are programmed to work as humans, they sleep at night just as humans do. They are programmed to turn off and turn on at certain hours of the day, making it appear real and function the way humans do.
Where are Social bots used Most?
Bots are used almost everywhere, or mostly on social platforms like Twitter, Reddit, Facebook, FourSquare, but there are most used in dating sites. Some bots are actually super popular on social media sites like Twitter where it’s actually not that uncommon to be revealed.
A bot has a higher ranking on websites like Klout (social media popularity ranking website) than actual celebrities. Some observers estimate that about 50% of the average Twitter user’s followers are actually bots.
Over To You
The rise of Bots has made things a bit easier and more serious than it sounds. In the marketing world today, marketers are using bots to get people to buy things. Politicians use bots to spread their message and share their campaign speeches on different social sites.
Real humans are beginning to discover bots that impersonate them. More like this is creating a social media world where information of any kind can’t be trusted anymore, making the real world more like a hybrid of humans and bots.
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