(2014-05-31) Social Twitterbots Gain Followers

Some Social TwitterBot-s manage to gain followers, build up a Klout Score, etc. The bots generate tweets either by reposting messages that others have posted or by creating their own synthetic tweets using a set of rules to pick out common words on a certain topic and put them together into a sentence. (Markov Chain) More surprisingly, the socialbots that generated synthetic tweets (rather than just reposting) performed better too. That suggests that Twitter users are unable to distinguish between posts generated by humans and by bots. “This is possibly because a large fraction of tweets in Twitter are written in an informal, grammatically incoherent style, so that even simple statistical models can produce tweets with quality similar to those posted by humans in Twitter,” suggest CarlosFreitas and co...