Whoever said “Money can’t buy you friends” clearly hasn’t been on the Internet recently. This past week, I bought 4,000 new followers on Twitter for the price of a cup of coffee. I picked up 4,000 friends on Facebook for the same $5 and, for a few dollars more, had half of them like a photo I shared on the site. If I had been willing to pay $3,700, I could have made 1 million — yes, 1 million — new friends on Instagram. For an extra $40, 10,000 of them would have liked one of my sunset photos. Retweets. Likes. Favourites. Comments. Page views. You name it; they’re for sale on websites like Swenzy, Fiverr and countless others. Many of my new friends live outside the US, mostly in India, Bangladesh, Romania and Russia — and they are not exactly human. They are bots, or lines of code. They were built to behave like people on social media sites. Bots have been around for years and they used to be easy to spot. They had random photos for avatars (often of a sultry woman), used computer-generated names (like Jen934107), and shared utter drivel. But today’s bots, to better camouflage their identities, have real-sounding names. They keep human hours, stopping activity during the middle of the night and picking up again in the morning. They share photos, laugh out loud — LOL! — and even engage in conversations with one another. And there are millions of them. These imaginary citizens of the Internet have surprising power, making celebrities and companies seem more popular than they really are, swaying public opinion about culture and products and influencing political agendas. “I’ve been working with these bots for a long time, and now they look like real people online — even though they are not,” said Tim Hwang, chief scientist at the Pacific Social Architecting Corp, a research group that explores how bots can shape social behaviour. There are a number of ways to build bots. One of the most popular bot management tools is a programme called Zeus, which sells for $700 and offers a simple dashboard from which you can control your bot army. More advanced programmers build their own bot farms from scratch. Bots often carry the hashtags of viewpoints that their owners actually oppose, to try to confuse people or redirect discussions. During the 2012 presidential elections in Mexico, the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI), was accused of using thousands of bots to drown out opposing parties’ messages online. A man I spoke with who would identify himself only as “Simon Z” operates Swenzy, which he says is based in the US. It sells followers, likes, downloads, views and comments on social sites. He says his company is using artificial intelligence and other digital manoeuvres to stay ahead of bot hunters at big companies like Google, Facebook and Twitter, which spend plenty of time trying to scrub bots from their sites. “There’s an evolutionary process at work where companies have built better spam filters, which has led to better bots,” Hwang said. Simon Z said he now operates 100,000 very advanced bots that are active on numerous networks, including YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, Vine, Instagram and SoundCloud. Simon Z’s clients include celebrities, musicians and politicians who want to seem more popular than they really are. Governments also use his bots, he said. In March, two students at the Technion, the Israel Institute of Technology, created a swarm of bots that caused a phony traffic jam on Waze, the navigation software owned by Google. The project, which was a class demonstration, was so sophisticated that the students were able to make bots that imitated Android cellphones that gained access to fake GPS signals and were operated by fake humans in fake cars. So be careful which bots you befriend. If it’s a bot with a different political viewpoint, your digital buddy may turn on you. Or even try to get you lost.
