be harvested by socialbots. More important, large-scale infiltration can lead to erosion of trust between users, which is the basic fabric of the SNS ecosystem.

As with any other socio-tech-
nical system, countermeasures
require both technical and human
factors. From the technical side,
SNSs can make the SbN operation
more difficult and less profitable
by, for example, improving the
accuracy and the speed of detect-
ing and blocking the bots. From
the user side, increasing aware-
ness and helping users make bet-
ter decisions when they receive
connection requests are also
avenues for further research.

Socialbots and
Marketing
DuBose Cole

Yazan Boshmaf ( http://ece.ubc.ca/~boshmaf) is a Ph.D. student at UBC interested in social network security and adversarial learning. Ildar Muslukhov ( http://ece.ubc.ca/~ildarm) is an M.Sc. student at UBC interested in online social networks and mobile security. Konstantin (Kosta) Beznosov is an associate professor at UBC doing research in computer security. Matei Ripeanu leads the Networked System Laboratory ( http://netsyslab.ece.ubc.ca) at UBC and is interested in large-scale distributed systems with a focus on self-organization and decentralized control.

Within the realm of marketing, the use of social robotics currently has limited exposure. Initially, their use may seem at odds with digital marketing for brands, especially in social media, as the most productive activity comes from a genuine conversation with the consumer. However, socialbots are still a

March + April 2012