Twitter und andere soziale Netzwerke werden von Programmen infiltriert, die sich als Menschen ausgeben, Freundschaften schließen und systematisch bestimmte Meinungen verbreiten. Können solche „social bots“ soziale Bewegungen beeinflussen?
JamesMTitus was manufactured by cyber-security specialists in New Zealand participating in a two-week social-engineering experiment organized by the Web Ecology Project. […] The group invited three teams to program “social bots”—fake identities—that could mimic human conversation on Twitter, and then picked 500 real users on the social network, the core of whom shared a fondness for cats. The Kiwis armed JamesMTitus with a database of generic responses (“Oh, that’s very interesting, tell me more about that”) and designed it to systematically test parts of the network for what tweets generated the most responses, and then to talk to the most responsive people.