Saturday, July 14, 2012: 10:00 am (Sassaman): This talk examines the topic of socialbots - realistic, automated bot identities online that are optimized to reliably elicit certain types of social behaviors in groups of users on platforms like Facebook and Twitter. Deployed en masse, large swarms of these bots are able to subtly (and not-so-subtly) shape the ways in which communities grow, connect, and behave on these platforms. Insofar as people increasingly come to rely on these networks into the future, the bots hold the promise (and threat) of shaping not only the social universe of opinions and influence, but real world coordination and action among people as well. Ultimately, this talk will conclude by discussing how these bots suggest the evolution of classic social engineering into a broader social hacking - which approaches human networks as if they were computer networks and applies similar principles for their compromise and defense against the social influence of third parties.

Hosted by Tim Hwang