Many players are trying to influence opinions on social media platforms in order to advance one’s political agenda. Large companies are working to sway public to a particular point of view and not only in politics but also to lobby other types of decisions relying on support of population.

In the industry of international dating and relationships with foreign women, bots are used to imitate chats with multiple admirers to maximize earnings by female profiles on pay per letter websites with fake “brides”. For instance, a bot can answer within the required length of time to avoid automatic fines imposed on content providers (operators of women’s profiles) if no response is sent back to a customer within 60 seconds (or whatever the setting is in this particular PPL dating chat).

A recent study analysed patterns in behaviour of bots as compared to humans and discovered that there are distinct differences.

How to separate bots from humans?

According to the study, humans change their behaviour during one session of using a social media website, while bots do not.

The checks were done among posts, shares, and answers relating to recent political events, as such topics are known to attract a lot of bots designed to promote a certain political agenda.

• The following indicators had been reviewed: quantity of interactions, number of tweets and retweets, mentions, replies, the length of the post.
• Humans were creating less content as the length of the session increased and were more engaged in replies and interactions with other users. They were creating less original content and using more retweets. Their own comments became shorter.
• Bots didn’t change the patterns of behaviour. They were doing the same things and interacted and created just as much content in the beginning and at the end of a session.

For social networks, knowing these patterns may be useful to detect bots.

But what do you do as a user? Can you detect non-humans without checking the patterns?

Of course, you can!

Tips to detect bots

• In social networks, if a person doesn’t answer the idea of your comment but posts some apocalyptic nonsense in response, it could be a bot.
• In the past, known patterns included software programs sending messages completely unrelated to the content of letters addressed to them. Humans were only checking certain mails arriving in response to requests (for money or personal information).
• On dating sites, there could be humans operating someone else’s profiles as well as bots. Pay per letter website profile operators use both!
• To ensure you are talking to a real human who is interested in you, there is no other method than chatting on video for prolonged periods of time. You need to chat for at least 15-20 minutes a few times a week for a few weeks, asking questions and getting responses. If this is happening, the woman is interested in you, she is not a fake, she is there because she wants to get to know you.
• If the video chat cuts short, or if the person only wants to talk on video once for a short time and then never wishes (or “cannot do it because of technical problems”), then drop it. You don’t even need to worry whether it’s a fake or the person is just not interested enough.
• Follow the principle: “Hell, yes!!! Or no.” It means that unless the other person is genuinely interested, you don’t try to pursue it. The bridge needs to be built from both ends.

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