Читать книгу Bots - Nick Monaco - Страница 24

As we saw above, spambots are computer programs that send out tens of thousands of messages or emails, often intended to draw users into malicious scams or to sell low-profile products. Some spambots function like crawlers, trawling the internet, looking for accessible comments sections to load up with spam or scraping webpages for email addresses to spam with emails. Examples of these crawler-type email scrapers include the ActiveAgent and RoverBot examples discussed in the previous section (Hayati et al., 2009; Leonard, 1997b pp. 140–148). Other spambots target social media sites, overloading users with malicious links or product promotion (Keelan et al., 2010). While spam is normally aimed at making money rather than disseminating political messaging, networks of social spambots can be reappropriated for political messaging with the flip of a switch (Monaco, 2019a; Thomas et al., 2012).