# Twitter Bots Create Surprising New Social Connections



## ekim68 (Jul 8, 2003)

> You might have encountered a Twitter bot before: an automated program that perhaps retweeted something you wrote because it had particular keywords. Or maybe you received a message from an unfamiliar, seemingly human-controlled account, only to click on an accompanying link and realize youd been fooled by a spambot.
> 
> Now a group of freelance Web researchers has created more sophisticated Twitter bots, dubbed socialbots, that can not only fool people into thinking they are real people, but also serve as virtual social connectors, speeding up the natural rate of human-to-human communication.


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