Tech Tips for Non-Tech People!
Original Air Date: Jan 14, 2019
Are They a Bot?
There’s no question about the impact of social media in many aspects of our lives.
It can influence buying decisions, our politics and it’s been used many times in global conflicts to communicate to the masses.
This popularity has also encouraged the usage of technology known as 'social bots' which are simply software programs that do their best to act like are real humans.
It’s not uncommon for companies to use automated posts but spam artists also employ them to send junk ads disguised as posts.
It some cases, governments will use them as propaganda channels.
The worst part is that bots are also used to infect accounts and resend malicious links, so it’s always best to avoid these undesirable accounts.
Twitter in particular is prone to lots of accounts that are using social bots, which is what led to a research project run by Indiana University.
They developed the ‘Truthy Project Bot or Not’ tool which attempts to analyze Twitter accounts for signs that they're a social bot.
It’s far from a definite tool, it’s a handy tool to avoid getting scammed by a profile that is trying to represent a real human.
https://truthy.indiana.edu/botornot
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