The Implications of Social Media Bots
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/11/20/fashion/social-media-bots-offer-phony-friends-and-real-profit.html?ref=technology&_r=0
The writer of this article describes something that seems almost trivial upon reading about it. It involves creating thousands of fake accounts on various social media websites, and then marketing these “fake friends” for sale. While this seems silly and that it would hardly effect anyone but lonely people on the internet, the effects that the dummy accounts have on the mechanics of the websites could be significant.
Due to the way sites like Facebook work, each fake friend contributes to calculations made in suggesting new friends, deciding what to post on one’s timeline, and even what advertisements to display. This is further magnified by the fact that someone who adds thousands of fake friends might affect their real friends who have nothing to do with this trend, as their real friend now has thousands of weak ties to fake accounts.
The world of digital advertising could also be affected by this flux of fake accounts. Companies could utilize these services to create the illusion of widespread popular support. They could hire a service to assign them thousands of fake supporters from varying fake backgrounds, which would then tie the company to many real users through connections formed by fake ones. This could be directly such as causing Facebook to suggest a page to like to the user, or from the user seeing a falsely-high number of supporters for a page and deciding to follow a “cascade” that actually contains more fake users than real.
Allowing services that create fake accounts on social networking sites is less harmless than it seems. The information taken from these sites is affected by each individual member of the site, and is used in million-dollar markets and transactions. Allowing this information to be skewed by large numbers of fake users poses a danger to the validity of information that these sites rely on.