Social Media Bots
Contents
Mitä ovat sosiaalisen median botit?. 2
Mitä tietoturvauhkia sosiaaliset botit sisältävät?. 2
Kuinka sosiaalisen median bottien kanssa tulisi toimia?. 3
Mistä tunnistaa sosiaalisen median bottikäyttäjän?. 4
Esimerkkejä sosiaalisen median bottien toimintalogiikasta. 4
What are social media bots?
What are social media bots? A social media bot, or social bot, refers to a user account that uses automations to try to mix with other users and act like a normal user in a social media service. Sometimes the social bot is referred to as social artificial intelligence/AI or a social algorithm. Social media bots post scams online, for example, false information and follow other users. An ordinary user may find that he or she has encountered a social bot if his or her followers have skyrocketed, publications receive a lot of likes and popularity, or certain harmful content spreads on social media channels due to key terms. Besides scams, frequently bots publish spam, where the goal of a bot user is to gain financial benefits. Spam could communicate to the normal user that he or she has won a significant prize or a publication link redirects the user to a peddler site.
As a word, the bot originates colloquially from a software robot that main purpose is to engage a human interaction with a user by using automatization. Not all bots are malicious since they have been taken advantage of in a firm’s customer chat services and even authorities can use them as an early warning procedure to notify environmental catastrophes. The bots enable to curb political hate speech or terrorist propaganda. Bots use, among other things, artificial intelligence, big data and breadth taking data bases to mimic a regular user.
What information security threats social media bots entail?
The increased popularity of social media has resulted in that social media bots have become more broadly known. In the most harmful situations, bots distribute fake news or fake information in which case they can be used intentionally to shape the public moods of the society. Besides, the bots can be part of the wider botnet in a denial-of-service attack to overburden and paralyse database or an information system. Unpatched networks, network vulnerabilities, zero-day vulnerabilities, weak password management, malicious web-pages, social engineering as well as insufficient information security practices can lead to bot infections. For instance, the shortened URL-links can take a user to inappropriate web pages that might include phishing of the personal data or a downloading malware. Hence, bots are sold in markets so that the bots behave according to a bot master who refers to a human person whose intentions the bots serve. The most conveniently, a user may buy ghost followers to boost the followers of the user account.
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- Political Dimension: manipulate a public opinion, add mistrust in a society, influence democratic processes, as well as spread disinformation and hates-speech
- Economic Dimension: the remove of fake accounts is expensive, distort stock markets, promotion a harmful product, as well as a fund collection by spams.
- Well-Being Dimension: reinforce particular detrimental social movements’ interests, phishing, narrow the freedom of speech, as well as bully users.
How should you deal with social media bots?
Eradicating social bots can be tricky from users’ perspective. Indeed, bots can be removed by recognising bot accounts, flagging them to a service provider, and removing the bot followers from the follower list of the user account. Occasionally, all users should inspect own followers in case of social bots on a regular basis. Furthermore, social media platforms like Facebook or Twitter do not encourage using third party apps to remove the bot followers of the user account. Neither users should communicate nor have an interaction with botts due to these only reinforce the scams and spams sent by social bots, thus also the aims of the bot master. It is therefore, a good idea to verify the authenticity of the post published by other users and the correctness of that post. Never should not be clicked links or download files, which have created by social bot accounts. In the below is enlisted appropriate information security behaviour against social bots.
- Do not overshare information about yourself or others. Oversharing information may reduce a chance for social engineering due to a manipulator can target more personalised content to you. To increase privacy, a user can turn their account from public to private that restricts who can follow you. Never accept follow requests or friend requests from unfamiliar people online.
- Avoid revealing essential personal information. Social media platforms frequently ask unnecessary information coarsening the use of the social media platform, such as a home residence, a full name and a birthday including with a birth year.
- Do not distribute disinformation if you recognise one. Refrain from an interaction with bots together with it is encouraged to mark scams and spams for the provider of a social media service.
- On a regular basis, check your social media followers if your followers include social bots. For example, a proper time interval to review potential social bot accounts could be once a year. Besides, social bots are easily identifiable by a user’s name or posting habits.
- Enhance account security. Enable two-factor authentication. Utilise sufficiently secure passwords.
How to recognise a social media bot from a user?
Social media bots possess faster and more irregular social media behaviour than a normal user. Bots are capable of publishing around the clock though some bots have been programmed to follow a human behaviour, so they would not be straightforwardly identifiable as bot users. Furthermore, social bots promote a particular kind of information, which strive to arouse strong reactions to people. Hence, strong reactions from normal users reduce interaction likelihood with social bots like responding to a publication posted by a bot. Also, bots can post with multiple languages to get broader audience for their posts. However, bots' posts follow similar patterns, e.g., the succeeding posts might entail same emojis and special characters time after time.
Nevertheless, social media bots are more general rather than specific; therefore, their profile pictures seem ordinary along with they rarely post anything interesting. Indeed, some bots may have a great number of followers, yet the bots have zero publication on their profile account. The former could even imply that the bot has other social bots as followers, which would not be atypical. In addition to, bots mix letters and numbers in their user names together with the accounts have been recently established or the account has existed lesser than year, indicating that the account is very probably a fake than a real one.
The examples of social media bots’ functions
A MonsterSocial bot on Facebook
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- Follows automatically new followers back.
- Finishes following if a follower unfollows.
- Adds particular users as its follower list.
- Sends a direct message to every new follower.
- Tweets randomly and automatically.