Just last Tuesday (October 3, 2017) we spoke on the podium at the APA IT Business Breakfast in Vienna, among other things, about social bots.
Social bots are automated opinion robots in social networks that can be misused for digital propaganda purposes.
They like tweets, respond and push a topic, suggesting that a broad section of the population is interested in it. They create a collective climate of opinion. In short: it came around again that the bot effect, i.e. how strongly we are influenced by bots, is on the one hand hardly measurable, and on the other hand it shouldn't be that big [note: greatly shortened]. That's not what it should be about now. Social bots are usually available on the black market and the things are made on request and customized. Very few buyers are familiar with the technology, so everything is kept simple and the code is well encrypted so that competitors don't steal it and resell it cheaper. There are also websites that officially advertise the sale of social bots, such as MonsterSocial .
The question is: how much do bots actually cost?
The answer: that depends on how good a bot or the campaign for which the bots are used should be. Detecting social bots means monitoring accounts. Good bots disguise themselves as humans so well that they are difficult to recognize. They have “bedtimes”, they post mixed content and are also able to communicate reasonably well. You just have to imagine the whole thing with social bots like this: Imagine I'm just pushing material into your hands, but you're not a mechanical engineer, but you need the finished machine. That would be really cheap, but you can't do much with it or build anything particularly great out of it. Imagine that I not only give you the material, but also build something for you with it because I can. It might cost you ten times as much, but that's what it's good for.
Discounter bot
Let's come back to the APA-IT-BusinessBreakfast, where Katharina Schell (APA) stood next to me on the podium and occasionally whispered to me that there were also discount bots.
I think this term is great because I assume that there are a large number of discount bots whose programming is only mediocre for savings reasons. That's why I immediately thought of the concept of the dear colleague this morning when the following image appeared in front of me.
Dear friends, also dear Katharina, this is what it looks like when bots are programmed incorrectly. The discount bot of the day:
Further:
Notes:
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