Botnet, a social network where it’s just you and a lot of bots

Botnet is a social media app where you’re the only human among a million bots trained on social media activity. Post pictures, status updates, or whatever else you want. Then let the likes and weird comments roll in.

You can even purchase troll bots, bots that tell dad jokes, and more bots.

Social media is on its way to mostly being bots anyways. Might as well jumpstart the future. Artificial intelligence for the win.

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Tweeting a map of every Census tract in the United States

By Neil Freeman, the @everytract bot on Twitter, as the name suggests, is tweeting a map of every Census tract in numerical order. It’s one map each half hour.

Census data, or data in general really, is typically in aggregate or about the overall trends, which requires an abstract view of a bunch of data points pushed together. So it’s nice to see a straightforward project put focus on the individual.

Of this genre, the censusAmericans bot is my favorite. It tweets people’s biographies based on data from the American Community Survey.

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Bot or Not: A Twitter user classifier

Michael W. Kearney implemented a classifier for Twitter bots. It’s called botornot:

Uses machine learning to classify Twitter accounts as bots or not bots. The default model is 93.53% accurate when classifying bots and 95.32% accurate when classifying non-bots. The fast model is 91.78% accurate when classifying bots and 92.61% accurate when classifying non-bots.

Overall, the default model is correct 93.8% of the time.

Overall, the fast model is correct 91.9% of the time.

You can enter Twitter accounts to see what the model projects here. It’s barebones, and I’m not sure what the curve represents, but it’s fun to poke at.

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Finding fake followers

This fake follower piece by Nicholas Confessore, Gabriel J.X. Dance, Richard Harris, and Mark Hansen for The New York Times is tops. In search of shortcuts to greater influence, many buy followers, likes, and retweets on Twitter. The numbers go up, but a lot of extra “influence” is just automated fluff.

The Times focuses on one company, Devumi, and investigates the follower pattern of some of the customers, as shown above. The scroll-y explanation is good. It’s even got pseudocode in there to explain the type of bots.

Good stuff.

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Bot automatically generates maps from American Community Survey data

Census bot

The American Community Survey is an ongoing survey run by the United States Census Bureau that collects data about who we are. The map maker bot by Neil Freeman is a Twitter bot that automatically generates county-level maps based on this ACS data. It’s been running for the past month, making one map per hour, so there are already lots of demographic breakdowns to browse.

Pretty awesome. The implementation gets extra plus points for making the maps straight out of a government pamphlet.

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Algorithmic search for a girlfriend

Sharif Corinaldi moved from New York to Berkeley for graduate school and was in search of a mate. However, after a bit of non-success with online dating sites, he figured a 0.0025 percent chance of finding a match, which meant about 400 messages sent before any success. So, he built a bot to browse and search for him. He accidentally left it running one night.

I fiddled with the model for a week, and it finally finished running late one Sunday night. Seated alone at a cold metal desk in my TA office, eagerly looking over these first results at 3am, I mouthed a silent curse under my breath. After arriving at realistic estimates for "female pickiness" (fem_Pck) and "creepiness tolerance" (creep_Tol), my model had determined I'd have to look through 600-700 profiles a night to have any hope of being exposed to Ms Right before she got fed up, burnt out and sequestered herself off in a nunnery, or at least got back with her ex. For someone who needed to spend every waking moment buried under an avalanche of quantum mechanics preprints, this wasn't going to cut it.

Disgusted, I set the model to aimlessly auto-browse profile information overnight, and left the lab. The next day I woke up and found that everything had changed.

Corinaldi has a girlfriend now, after casting a very wide net.

Kids these days.

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