Bloombergkrönikör: Nu är trollen efter svenska valet

A social bot (also: socialbot or socbot) is a particular type of chatbot that is employed in social media networks to automatically generate messages (e.g. tweets) or in general advocate certain ideas, support campaigns, and public relations either by acting as a "follower" or even as a fake account that gathers followers itself. In this respect, social bots can be said to have passed the Turing test. Social bots appear to have played a significant role in the United States presidential election, 2016 and their history appears to go back at least to the United States midterm elections, 2010. It is estimated that 9-15% of active Twitter accounts may be social bots and that 15% of the total Twitter population active in the US Presidential election discussion were bots. At least 400,000 thousand bots were responsible for about 3.8 million tweets, roughly 19% of the total volume. All these claims are disputed.Twitterbots are already well-known examples, but corresponding autonomous agents on Facebook and elsewhere have also been observed. Nowadays, social bots can generate convincing internet personas that are well capable of influencing real people, although they are not always reliable.Social bots, besides being able to produce messages autonomously, also share many traits with spambots with respect to their tendency to infiltrate large user groups.Unless strict regulations on their use are passed, socialbots are expected to play a major role in future shaping of public opinion by autonomously acting as incessant and never-tiring influencers.