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, more…