How to make fake friends and influence people politically with botnets

How to make fake friends and influence people politically with botnets

Author: Deepak Puri / Source: CIO Credit: https://pixabay.com/en/technology-robot-human-hand-2025795/ Dale Carnegie would be horrified.

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Credit: https://pixabay.com/en/technology-robot-human-hand-2025795/

Dale Carnegie would be horrified. His classic on how to influence people has been perverted for online political manipulation.

How do botnets work? How are they used for mass deception? How to recognize that you might be interacting with a political bot?

Background
Social media has evolved from personal communications to an impersonal one. Chatbots can be programmed to post and tweet automatically. They’re versatile and interactions appear human. They even get smarter as they learn from interactions with people. In reality, they’re programs that interact through a chat interface and respond based on preset rules and artificial intelligence. Chatbots are now responsible for much of the traffic on rate Facebook Messenger and Twitter. Botlist features hundreds of bots everything from checking stock prices to online dating.

Facebook reports that its Messenger and WhatsApp now process 60 billion messages per day which is more that three times the volume on SMS. Sending a message via Facebook Messenger costs a fraction of sending one by SMS.

Bots & botnets
Most social media users interact with information through a web-interface. Bots, however interact through an application programming interface (API) which enables them to analyze posts and respond in real-time. Botnets are networks of bots. A botnet may consist of hundreds of accounts, all controlled by a single user. Social botnets are interconnected and programmed to follow and re-message each other.

Bot creation has been simplified. ChatFuel even allow bots to be developed without coding. Conversational rules are defined on a dashboard. Bots recognize phrases from users and reply with predefined answers using Natural Language Programming (NLP). Jerry Wang explains how to develop bots for Facebook Messenger with Heroku and Node.

chatfuel dashboard screenshot aihttps://chatfuel.com/
Chatbots gone bad


Chatbots can be used for both legitimate and malicious purposes. They’re used to suppress voices, and hate speech. They’re now increasingly for political purposes.

To simulate a big following, it helps to have many ‘virtual’ users. But, recruiting real followers and developing bots takes time. Online marketplaces offer both, with different IP addresses and further obfuscated with proxy servers to mask their identities. A chatbot is a form of ‘sockpuppet’, which is an online identity used for deception. Misleading online identities, are used to praise, defend or support a person in order to manipulate public opinion.

How to spot a bot?
No matter how well they masquerade themselves, botnets can often be spotted by these traits.

1. Response time: Bots are programmed to respond automatically. So when tweets and responses appear within a fraction of a millisecond, it’s a good bet that the response came from a bot.
2. Volume: Political bots lurk in certain chat groups waiting for the mention of certain topics or keywords. This could…

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