Friends, and Influence, for Sale Online
Friends, and Influence, for Sale Online
By NICK BILTON
APRIL 20, 2014, 11:00 AM
There are several services that allow social media users
to buy bots, which can make celebrities appear more popular and even influence
political agendas.
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 shell out $3,700, I could have
made one million — yes, a million — new friends on Instagram. For an extra $40,
10,000 of them would have liked one of my sunset photos.
Retweets. Likes. Favorites. Comments. Upvotes. 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 United States,
mostly in India, Bangladesh, Romania and Russia — and they are not exactly
human. They are bots, or lines of code. But 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 (mostly
links to pornography sites).
But today’s bots, to better camouflage their identity,
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 each other. And
there are millions of them.
These imaginary citizens of the Internet have surprising
power, making celebrities, wannabe celebrities and companies seem more popular
than they really are, swaying public opinion about culture and products and, in
some instances, influencing political agendas.
“I’ve been working with these social bots for a really
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
Corporation, a research group that explores how bots and technologies can shape
social behavior.
There are a number of different ways to build bots. One
of the most popular bot management tools is a program called Zeus, which sells
for $700 and offers a simple dashboard from which you can control your bot
army. (In addition to creating social media bots, the program is used for more
nefarious purposes, like identity theft.) More advanced programmers build their
own bot farms from scratch.
Bots often carry the hashtags — online road signs for a
particular discussion — of viewpoints that their owners actually oppose, to try
to confuse people or muffle or redirect discussions.
During the 2012 presidential elections in Mexico, the
Institutional Revolutionary Party, or PRI, was accused of using tens of
thousands of bots to drown out opposing parties’ messages on Twitter and
Facebook. The PRI is to said have employed a little trickery, parsing and
twisting language enough to confuse people about what the opposition really
meant to say online.
Over the years in Syria, a number of bot groups have
cursed, browbeaten and threatened anyone tweeting favorably about protests or
opposition leaders.
In Turkey, where Twitter was briefly banned not long ago,
an investigation found that every political party was controlling bots that
were trying to force topics to become trends on social sites that favored one
political ideal over another. The bots would also use a political group’s
slogan as a hashtag, with the intent of fooling people into believing it was
more popular than it really was.
A man I spoke with who would identify himself only as
“Simon Z” operates Swenzy, which he says is based in the United States. It
sells followers, likes, downloads, views and comments on social sites.
He says his company is using artificial intelligence and
other digital maneuvers to stay ahead of the bot hunters at big Internet
companies like Google, Facebook and Twitter, which spend plenty of time trying
to scrub bots from their sites. Sometimes it works — at least for a while.
Before Twitter’s public stock offering, the company
scrubbed millions of bots from the service. Over the years, Google has removed
hundreds of millions of video views on YouTube attributed to bots.
“There’s an evolutionary process at work where companies
have built better spam filters, which has lead to better bots,” said Mr. Hwang.
Simon Z’s bots act like people by acquiring information
from real users, including avatars, pictures and other conversations. With all
of these tricks, he said, they appear to “emulate human behavior.”
He said he now operates 100,000 very advanced bots that
are active on numerous networks, including YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, Vine,
Instagram and SoundCloud, an audio sharing site. When buyers make significant
orders of bots, he said he can go to “underground suppliers” who operate larger
bot farms. (It is not illegal to own a bot, or make them; the legality falls
into how people use them. Their use often goes against social media sites’
terms of service.)
His clients include celebrities, musicians and
politicians who want to seem more popular than they really are. Governments
also use his bots, he said.
“This is all about power and control, the same thing it’s
always been, but now it’s digital and you can do a lot more of it,” said Rick
Wesson, chief executive of Support Intelligence, a computer security consulting
firm based in San Francisco.
For now, these bots are simply deceptive, tricking people
into thinking something is popular or pushing an agenda. But as bots become
more sophisticated, Mr. Wesson said, they could become nastier.
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 accessed fake GPS signals and were operated by fake humans in
fake cars. The Waze software, believing that the bots were on the road, started
to redirect actual traffic down different streets, even though there was no
traffic jam to avoid.
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.
Email: bilton@nytimes.com Twitter: @nickbilton
A version of this article appears in print on 04/21/2014,
on page B1 of the NewYork edition with the headline: Friends, and Influence,
for Sale.
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