Are You Following Socialbots On Twitter? [STUDY]

Researchers recently let 120 socialbots loose on Twitter. And not only did these bots infiltrate social groups, many of them became quite influential.

As Technology Review reports, Carlos Freitas and researchers at the Federal University of Minas Gerais in Brazil create 120 socialbots on Twitter. These bots were given basic identities – a gender, a profile, and some followers. They were then programmed to tweet, either by retweeting what others had posted or by creating a “synthetic” original tweet by using rules to identify common words surrounding a topic, and piecing them together in a sentence.