People are Strange when you're a Stranger: Impact and Influence of Bots on Social Networks

摘要

Bots are, for many Web and social media users, the source of many dangerousattacks or the carrier of unwanted messages, such as spam. Nevertheless,crawlers and software agents are a precious tool for analysts, and they arecontinuously executed to collect data or to test distributed applications.However, no one knows which is the real potential of a bot whose purpose is tocontrol a community, to manipulate consensus, or to influence user behavior. Itis commonly believed that the better an agent simulates human behavior in asocial network, the more it can succeed to generate an impact in thatcommunity. We contribute to shed light on this issue through an online socialexperiment aimed to study to what extent a bot with no trust, no profile, andno aims to reproduce human behavior, can become popular and influential in asocial media. Results show that a basic social probing activity can be used toacquire social relevance on the network and that the so-acquired popularity canbe effectively leveraged to drive users in their social connectivity choices.We also register that our bot activity unveiled hidden social polarizationpatterns in the community and triggered an emotional response of individualsthat brings to light subtle privacy hazards perceived by the user base.