Tech Tips for Non-Tech People!
Original Air Date: Oct 20, 2017
Social Botometer
The influence of social media has become very apparent in virtually every aspect of our lives.
Everything from basic buying decisions and politics to the financial markets and global conflicts are being influenced by social media every single day.
This popularity has created a technology known as the 'social bot' which is simply software programs attempting to appear as humans.
They are often used by companies for creating automated posts while spammers use them to hit our profiles with junk advertising and in some cases, governments use them for propaganda campaigns.
On the dark side, social bots can be used to infect other accounts by circulating malicious links, so it is always best to avoid them if you can.
Twitter in particular seems to have a large percentage of profiles that seem to be leveraging social bots, which was the impetus for a research project at Indiana University.
The "Truthy Project” Botometer tool was created to try to analyze Twitter profiles for signs that they are using social bots.
While it’s far from a definite analysis, it can be a helpful tool to avoid getting tricked by a profile that may seem to be a real human user.
I’ve posted a link to the project at DataDoctors.com/radio
http://truthy.indiana.edu/botornot
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