Most atheists today seem to spend a lot of time online. This makes sense because there are so many active and engaging atheist communities online. But did you ever stop to wonder if perhaps the "people" you were interacting with weren't really people in the first place? They probably are, but the time may be coming when such assumptions will be tougher to justify.
Recently there was a little contest called Socialbots 2011. Three "socialbots," each run by a different team. Each bot integrated itself into an online Twitter community in order to test whether they could appear sufficiently human and alter the structure of the targeted social network. In each of the three cases, the answers to both questions was "yes".
The socialbots looked at tweets sent by members of a network of Twitter users who shared a particular interest, and then generated a suitable response. In one exchange a bot asks a human user which character they would like to bring back to life from their favourite book. When the human replies "Jesus" it responds: "Honestly? no fracking way. ahahahhaa."
Interactions like this were realistic enough to attract attention from members of the targeted community, who started to follow the bots and respond to their messages. The best-performing bot was able to gain more than 100 followers and generated almost 200 responses.
When the experiment ended last month, a before-and-after comparison of connections within the target community showed that the bots were "able to heavily shape and distort the structure of the network", according to its organiser, Tim Hwang, founder of the startup company Robot, Robot and Hwang, based in San Francisco.
Some members of the community who had not previously been directly connected were now linked, for example. Hwang has not revealed the identities of the entrants, or of the members of the 500-person Twitter network that the bots infiltrated.
Source: New Scientist
It's entirely possible that an atheist group was one of the targeted communities there, though of course the researchers aren't saying. We may never know for sure. The results here are pretty interesting, though, because real and measurable effects were produced on the social communities.
I'm sure that one doesn't need a "bot" to do this, either -- just an understanding of what the bots needed to do in order to produce the effects. This could be used for good or ill -- the military is already looking at it. On a simpler level, an atheist could alter an online network of religious believers. A believer could alter an online network of atheists.
It's a bit disturbing, when you stop to think about it.
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