>In the second example we have an ambitious entrepreneur who wants to get the word out on their new thing. They create over time a few hundred thousand 'fake' twitter accounts, they construct a community of fake accounts following each other. Then they write a simple program to have their 'influential' tweeters push out the word and their 'followers' pick it up and retweet it. If they have let the accounts lay there for a bit they pick up their own share of robot followers (from other people doing this) and our ambitious entrepreneur creates what looks like a real groundswell of interest in what ever thing they are trying to push.
This is exactly what HBGary built. But it wasn't ads they wanted and it wasn't for money. They built sock puppet management apps for the DoD to influence public sentiment about various things the government wanted... except they got caught.
Yup, and there are several perhaps as many as a dozen 'sock puppet' systems out there today.
Generally I refer to any program which is using APIs intended for humans in order to achieve a result for the person who ran it, a 'bot'. Comes from folks who build scripted clients for computer games.
This is exactly what HBGary built. But it wasn't ads they wanted and it wasn't for money. They built sock puppet management apps for the DoD to influence public sentiment about various things the government wanted... except they got caught.