Content area
Full Text
How they spread misinformation
dispatches
Bots are automatic software programs that perform repetitive tasks to gather data from the internet. Bots can automate tedious and time-consuming processes efficiently, but they can also be deployed to mine users' data or manipulate public opinion. The Imperva Incapsula security company's Bot Traffic Report 2016 (bit.ly/2kzZ6Nn) estimates that approximately 30% of internet traffic is produced by malicious bots.
In social media, bots collect information by crawling the internet for specific keywords and hashtags and sharing them on sites like Facebook and Twitter. Some social bots were developed to behave like a human-using emojis in their posts, only posting at reasonable hours of the day, or limiting the amount of information they share. They have become increasingly sophisticated, making it difficult to distinguish a bot-generated internet persona from a live human. In 2014, Twitter revealed in a Securities and Exchange Commission filing that approximately 8.5%...