SOCIAL BOTS: HOW ROBOTS CAN BECOME INFLUENTIAL ON TWITTER

Abstract

Systems like Klout and Twitalyzer were developed as an attempt to measure the influence of users within social networks. Although the algorithms used by these systems are not publicly known, they have been widely used to rank users according to their influence in the Twitter social network. As media companies might base their viral marketing campaigns on influence scores, in this paper, we investigate if these systems are vulnerable and easy to manipulate. Our approach consists of developing Twitter robot accounts able to interact with real users in order to verify strategies that can increase their influence scores according to different systems. Our results show that it is possible to become influential using very simple strategies, suggesting that these systems should review their influence score algorithms to avoid being tricked by automatic activity.