These events offer several lessons. The first is that digitization drives botification; the use of technology in a realm of human activity enables the creation of software to act in lieu of humans. A second lesson is that when they become sufficiently sophisticated, numerous, and embedded within the human systems within which they operate, these automated scripts can significantly shape those human systems. While the May 2010 event was a widely observed manifestation of the influence of socialbots, it is quite likely that most robotic activity in the stock market goes completely unnoticed, and high-frequency trading firms—and their financial robots—exert considerable hidden influence over the pricing and behavior of the marketplace, as well as the humans who gain and lose value in that marketplace.

Social robots (socialbots)— software agents that interact on social networking services (SNSs)—have been receiving attention in the press lately. Automated scripts have been used in email, chat rooms, and other platforms for online interactions in the past. What distinguishes these “social” bots from their historical predecessors is a focus on creating substantive relationships among human users—as opposed to financial resources—and shaping the aggregate social behavior and patterns of relationships between groups of users online. The gains and losses will be in the realm of social capital rather than financial capital, but the stakes are just as high.

The ethical stakes are similarly high. While much has been made about the dark side of social robotics, several positive applications of this technology are emerging.

Swarms of bots could be used to heal broken connections between infighting social groups and bridge existing social gaps. Socialbots could be deployed to leverage peer effects to promote more civic engagement and participation in elections [ 5]. Sufficiently advanced groups of bots could detect erroneous information being spread virally in an SNS and work in concert to inhibit the spread of that disinformation by countering with well-sourced facts [ 6]. Moreover, the bots themselves may significantly advance our understanding of how relationships form on these platforms, and of the underlying mechanisms that drive social behaviors online.

Despite these potential benefits, it would be naive not to consider that the technology may also enable novel malicious uses. The same bots that can be used to surgically bring together communities of users can also be used to shatter those social ties. The same socialbot algorithms that might improve the quality and fidelity of information circulated in social networks can be used to spread misinformation. Moreover, the fact that many of these automated systems operate as if they were real humans almost reflexively brings up the many questions around the deceptive qualities of the technology. The ethical questions raised by the use and potential abuse of socialbots makes this type of research a concern both within and beyond the academic setting.

This is not a resolved issue. On
the backdrop of this significant
and continuing debate, research
into the uses and implications of
this technology continues to prog-
ress. One of our goals in compos-
ing this article is to raise aware-
ness of past, present, and future
socialbot applications and enable
a broader spectrum of interested
participants and observers to
address these issues directly and
transparently.

A Socialbots Competition @tinypirate and @AeroFade

 

In February 2011, the Web Ecology Project organized a competition to explore how socialbots could influence changes in the social graph of a subnetwork on Twitter. The competition, Socialbots, tasked each of three teams with building software robots that