{"id":1193,"date":"2011-07-02T06:24:03","date_gmt":"2011-07-02T14:24:03","guid":{"rendered":"\/?p=1193"},"modified":"2011-07-02T11:37:01","modified_gmt":"2011-07-02T19:37:01","slug":"robots-reshaping-social-networks","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.identityblog.com\/?p=1193","title":{"rendered":"Robots reshaping social networks"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>In May I was fascinated by a <a href=\"http:\/\/www.theatlantic.com\/magazine\/archive\/2011\/05\/are-you-following-a-bot\/8448\/\">story in the Atlantic<\/a>\u00a0 on <a href=\"http:\/\/www.webecologyproject.org\/\">The Ecology Project <\/a>&#8211;\u00a0a group\u00a0&#8220;interested in a question of particular concern to social-media experts and marketers: Is it possible not only to infiltrate social networks, but also to influence them on a large scale?&#8221;\u00a0<\/p>\n<p>The Ecology Project\u00a0was turning the <a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Turing_test\">Turing Test<\/a> on its side, and\u00a0setting up experiments to see\u00a0how potentially massive networks of &#8220;SocialBots&#8221; (<a href=\"http:\/\/www.popularmechanics.com\/technology\/engineering\/robots\/4343892\">social robots<\/a>) might be able to\u00a0impact human social networks by interacting with their members.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n<p>In the first such experiment it invited teams from around the world to manufacture SocialBots\u00a0 and\u00a0picked 500 real Twitter users, the core of whom shared &#8220;a fondness for cats&#8221;.\u00a0\u00a0At the end of their two-week experiment,\u00a0network graphs showed that the teams\u2019 bots had insinuated themselves strikingly into the center of the target network.<\/p>\n<p><img loading=\"lazy\" class=\"alignright\" style=\"float: right; margin-left: 10px; margin-right: 10px;\" src=\"\/wp-content\/images\/2011\/06\/robot_socialgraph.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"229\" height=\"224\" \/><\/p>\n<p>The Web Ecology Blog <a href=\"http:\/\/www.webecologyproject.org\/2011\/02\/socialbots-the-end-game\/\">summarized the results <\/a>this way:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>With the stroke of midnight on Sunday, the first Socialbots competition has officially ended. It\u2019s been a crazy last 48 hours. At the last count, the final scores (and how they broke down) were:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li><strong>Team C: 701 Points (107 Mutuals, 198 Responses)<\/strong><\/li>\n<li><strong>Team B: 183 Points (99 Mutuals, 28 Responses)<\/strong><\/li>\n<li><strong>Team A: 170 Points (119 Mutuals, 17 Responses)<\/strong><\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>This leaves the winner of the first-ever Socialbots Cup as <strong>Team C. <\/strong>Congratulations!<\/p>\n<p>You also read those stats right. In under a week, Team C\u2019s bot was able to generate close to <em>200<\/em> responses from the target network, with conversations ranging from a few back and forth tweets to an actual set of lengthy interchanges between the bot and the targets. Interestingly, mutual followbacks, which played so strong as a source for points in Round One, showed less strongly in Round Two, as teams optimized to drive interactions.<\/p>\n<p>In any case, much further from anything having to do with mutual follows or responses, the proof is really in the pudding. The network graph shows the enormous change in the configuration of the target network from <a href=\"http:\/\/robotandhwang.com\/Socialbots\/socialbots0a.pdf\" class=\"broken_link\">when we first got started many moons ago<\/a>. The bots have increasingly been able to carve out their own independent community \u2014 as seen in the clustering of targets away from the established tightly-knit networks and towards the bots themselves.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>The Atlantic story summarized the implications this way:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>Can one person controlling an identity, or a group of identities, really shape social architecture? Actually, yes. The Web Ecology Project\u2019s analysis of 2009\u2019s post-election protests in Iran revealed that only a handful of people accounted for most of the Twitter activity there. The attempt to steer large social groups toward a particular behavior or cause has long been the province of lobbyists, whose \u201castroturfing\u201d seeks to camouflage their campaigns as genuine grassroots efforts, and company employees who pose on Internet message boards as unbiased consumers to tout their products. But social bots introduce new scale: they run off a server at practically no cost, and can reach thousands of people. The details that people reveal about their lives, in freely searchable tweets and blogs, offer bots a trove of personal information to work with. \u201cThe data coming off social networks allows for more-targeted social \u2018hacks\u2019 than ever before,\u201d says Tim Hwang, the director emeritus of the Web Ecology Project. And these hacks use \u201cnot just your interests, but your behavior.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>A week after Hwang\u2019s experiment ended, Anonymous, a notorious hacker group, penetrated the e-mail accounts of the cyber-security firm HBGary Federal and revealed a solicitation of bids by the United States Air Force in June 2010 for \u201cPersona Management Software\u201d\u2014a program that would enable the government to create multiple fake identities that trawl social-networking sites to collect data on real people and then use that data to gain credibility and to circulate propaganda.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cWe hadn\u2019t heard of anyone else doing this, but we assumed that it\u2019s got to be happening in a big way,\u201d says Hwang. His group has published the code for its experimental bots online, \u201cto allow people to be aware of the problem and design countermeasures.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>The Ecology Project <a href=\"http:\/\/www.webecologyproject.org\/2011\/02\/complete-source-code-from-socialbots-2011\/\">source code is available here<\/a>.\u00a0 Fascinating.\u00a0 We&#39;re talking very basic stuff that none-the-less takes social engineering in an important\u00a0and disturbingly different new direction.\u00a0<\/p>\n<p>As is the case with the use of robots for social profiling, the use of robots to reshape social networks raises\u00a0important questions about\u00a0attribution and\u00a0identity (the Atlantic story actually described SocialBots as &#8220;fake identities&#8221;).\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n<p><img loading=\"lazy\" class=\"alignleft\" style=\"margin: 10px 15px; float: left;\" src=\"\/wp-content\/images\/2011\/06\/are_you_a_human.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"175\" height=\"98\" \/>Given\u00a0that\u00a0SocialBots\u00a0will\u00a0inevitably\u00a0and quickly evolve, we can see that the\u00a0ability to\u00a0demonstrate that you are\u00a0a natural flesh-and-blood person\u00a0rather than a robot will\u00a0increasingly become an\u00a0essential ingredient of digital reality.\u00a0 It will be crucial that such a proof can be given without\u00a0requiring you to identify yourself,\u00a0 relinquish your anonymity, or spend your whole life completing grueling captcha challenges.\u00a0<\/p>\n<p>I am again struck by our deep historical need for minimal disclosure\u00a0technology <a href=\"https:\/\/connect.microsoft.com\/site1188\">like U-Prove<\/a>, with its amazing ability to\u00a0enable unlinkable anonymous assertions\u00a0(like liveness) and\u00a0yet still\u00a0reveal the identities of those (like the manufacturers of armies of SocialBots) who abuse them through over-use.<\/p>\n<p>\u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Twitter SocialBots were &#8220;increasingly able to carve out their own independent community \u2014 as seen in the clustering of targets away from the established tightly-knit networks and towards the bots themselves.&#8221;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":68,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[19,6,2,64,73,74],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.identityblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1193"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.identityblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.identityblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.identityblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/68"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.identityblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1193"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.identityblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1193\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.identityblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1193"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.identityblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1193"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.identityblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1193"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}