Twitter bots create events internationally

When Greg Marra (pictured) built the @Trackgirl twitter bot in 2008, he just wanted to see if the Python script could penetrate the social network of real people. He did not expect people to really worry about @Trackgirl, send direct messages to her and be interested in her state of health after her fictional injury.

@Trackgirl tracked the stream of tweets with currently popular hashtags, and published them on its own behalf. Three times a day she followed 5 people. It turned out that she was connected with the right people, and other people began to follow her, believing that her copy-paste about long-distance running came from a living person. Once she tweeted that she had injured her knee ... Thousands of people were interested in the script's well-being and sincerely empathized with the bot.

Botnets of this kind are slowly but surely gaining the trust of subscribers in order to begin to influence the audience at the right moment. There is clear evidence that twitter bots are used for political purposes, for example:

"Egyptians" around the world tweet about unrest during the revolution:

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The State Department asked Twitter to postpone the scheduled outage to the service in order not to interrupt the communication of users in Iran during protest demonstrations at the weekend ... One of the tweets in the screenshot: “Switch your location on Twitter to Tehran! Help defend the elections in Iran and defeat the Iranian censors! ”

Activists in Mexico discovered a botnet of 20,000 fake Twitter accounts supporting one of the political parties during the November 2011 elections.

Specialized companies provide campaigns in social networks. For example, this one advertises its network of 25,000 users who make money by viewing messages, voting, posts:

Specialized software allows you to maintain on one computer up to 10 personal profiles with its unique background, interests, history, technically, culturally and geographically impeccable in terms of opportunities to detect fraud. Interestingly, this software is ordered on the Federal Procurement website and guess which country.

To justify the inclusion of this review in the “Do it yourself” column, I’ll give the recipe of Greg Marr mentioned above how to build an influential twitter bot with a target follower conversion of 25-35%.