Online Evolution – Twitterbots Are More and More Human
Under the surface of Twitter a cruel arms race is taking place. On one side stand the Twitterbots and on the other side, we can see searching algorithms. And Artificial Intelligence is slowly becoming a part of both.
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If you don't know, Twitterbots are software-based personalities that control a Twitter account. They can behave cutely, try to be normal or even be completely disgusting. Over time, they became a part of our reality and most people are becoming better and better and recognizing who exactly is a bot. Its all about experience and intuition. This is a skill that is very useful in this day and age as many bots are intentionally pretending to be real humans to do nefarious deeds. On the other hand, thanks to their intimate coexistence with human online the bots are becoming more and more sophisticated. And more like real humans.
The humanization of Twitterbots is something that intrigued a research team from the University of Southern California that decided to observe the behavior of Twitterbots and analyze their possible influence on the 2020 American election. During their research, they studied 244 699 Twitter accounts that commented on politics during the American elections in the years 2016 and 2018. They used a tooled called Bolometer that was developed at Indiana University and they found that roughly 12.6 % of the accounts were bots.
They also found that in 2016 the bots were quite robotic and mostly they just periodically retweeted other tweets. But in just two years the bots changed quite a lot. They now behave much more humanly and it's much harder to figure out if they are a bot or a real human user of Twitter.
Scientists say that this shows that the bots and their creators are actively trying to improve. Their activity shifted into the area of surveys and questions. A bot now asks questions and then analyzes answers of naive human users and uses that to become even more human. This looks like an online arms race because the other side is constantly improving as well. Twitter and other social media are trying to fight bots. Track them and ban them. The bots then evolve and the battle starts over again.
At the moment, Artificial Intelligence is becoming the key to the next step for both the bots and the algorithms that try to catch them. But to see who wins the next round we will have to wait.
Sources:
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Cool twitter bot.
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