Buzz Bots that Surf the Social Media Web

November 18th, 2007 by Jobe Roberts

One of my favourite social network sites seems to have become infested with buzz bots. Buzz bots are software bots that pretend to be human, but are actually just out to spread their viral advertising. Quite often these bots feed back any real world interaction to a real human counterpart usually referred to by the worker bots as the ‘Queen’. A single hive of buzz bots can completely overwhelm a social network unless proper extermination is undertaken by the owners of the social media environment.

If you recognize this screenshot as a part of your social network, you should take action before it’s too late! This buzz bot sent me a friend invite, had a complete although somewhat meaningless profile and then started spamming me with ads. However, the trouble really starts when the bots begin to interact with each other and no one can tell who’s a bot and who’s not.

Of course, this isn’t the first time we’ve had an infestation of buzz bots on the web. The use of ‘date bait’ bots caused quite a stir for Match.com and Yahoo Personals. Had Anti-Buzz-Bot 0.9b been around at the time (2005), they may have saved themselves from the lawsuit.

Tags: buzz-bots, social-media, date-bait