social bot

Social bots are programs that simulate human behavior. They are used in social networks and provide automatic interaction with users of the social networks, by whom they are mistaken for human users because of their social behavior.

The human behavior of social bots is achieved through artificial intelligence, data mining and access to databases. Artificial intelligence allows social bots to interact with other bots and with humans. Therefore, they can also be used to communicate directly with customers. By accessing databases, they can come up with knowledge about current events and influence the opinion of other users like an influencer. For example, before a purchase decision or an election. Social bots mostly work with short messages and microblogs. A popular platform for the distribution of social bots is therefore Twitter, because the tweets are relatively short and simple, which suits the aspirations of social bots.

Like other bots, social bots can also pose a security risk and spy on sensitive user data.