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Twitter Bots: Social media’s black market
[Technology / Tools / Social Media / Culture]

If you work in social media, you’re no stranger to Twitter bots. But if you don’t, you may be surprised to know that many people, including celebrities and marketers, buy Twitter followers. While great brands are focusing on engagement, many people just want the numbers. And that’s where buying followers comes into play. There are services on the internet where you can pay for what many call Twitter Bots (short for Twitter Robots) to follow any given username. This article from Fast Company highlights StatusPeople, a web app which aims to showcase how many followers of any given account are real vs bots. Another Fast Company article dives into the girls in the profile images of these Twitter bots. Both articles are quite interesting and informative, even for Twitter experts.

In our Blade Runner future there is a market for services that can verify whether someone is human or not. In our present only our avatars need verification. I almost consider this present more advanced.

Working in “Social” I find spambots and dark marketing both brilliantly fascinating and frustratingly hilarious.

The fascinating part is stuff like Tim Wang’s Socialbots experiment which tries to see if Twitter bots could fool people into thinking they were real. (Answer: yes they can when they’re really clever. Read that article anyway as the winner truly was brilliant.)

The hilarious end consists of anarchistic autofollow and autotweet Twitter bots that flood your hashtag searches and trending topics. If not for their commercial ends, they would seem almost political, trying to bring down the system through the constant injection of noise.

But ultimately it’s a good thing if you listen to James Bridle’s words about seeing spambots not as a burden on the system but as, perhaps, a nascent form of intelligence, just on the verge of becoming actual life:

They’re all out there, these consciousnesses, these ways of seeing in the world, and what we need to do is by sympathetic to them. To ask them into our lives, to collaborate with them instead of shutting them down. Because they are all looking for love. They all want to speak to us. They all want to be part of the world. And all I ask is that you look at them with happier eyes.”

Watch James’s talk at Lift12: “WE FELL IN LOVE IN A CODED SPACE” as my paraphrasing doesn’t do it justice.