From Fake News to Fake Bots

Where tech influences art

It’s all about disclosure; all adverts should be upfront and clear. In terms of the law, you can’t behave as a private individual when in fact you’re a commercial entity

This blurring of the lines between who is and who isn’t an individual goes to the very heart of this issue.

Given the importance of ‘personal’ reviews, it shouldn’t come as any surprise that the world of book publishing isn’t safe from outside ‘commercial’ influences…no surprise at all.

Online reviews – your new best friend

An overwhelming 90 percent of respondents who recalled reading online reviews claimed that positive online reviews influenced buying decisions, while 86 percent said buying decisions were influenced by negative online reviews

Source: Marketing Land

You can pick whichever data source you like (so let’s not be too prescriptive on the exact percentages!) but the overwhelming evidence is that reviews and recommendations are vital.

This has always been the case in the non-tech world – we trust our family, our friends, and our colleagues (in varying degrees!) and respect their opinions, which influences what we do or don’t purchase.

However, in the tech world, where online reviews proliferate, there is a confusion between friend and foe…or at least, friend and robot.

The social media bestseller

Books are one of the original word-of-mouth products – even the recommendations on the book cover itself can be big influencers on purchasing decisions.

And that’s before you begin to factor the power of online reviews….whether they be real or not.

Consider this recent example:

Billy Taylor’ self-published debut, Just Friends, might easily have been dismissed as a soppy romance that he would later cringe a little to look back on. But the book has become an international bestseller

The Times, Monday 27 February 2017

By February 2017, Taylor’s book had reached the Top 10 of the Apple US iBook chart, thanks to a legion of teenage female fans who have followed him avidly on twitter, helping him to sell over 150,000 copies of his $2.99 ebook, generating $450,000 of sales in the process.

However, amongst the number of ‘teenage girls’ tweeting about and recommending Taylor, are a number of dubious accounts which are likely to be ‘fake bots’.

Consider that most ‘fake bots’ and linked together to create a ‘Zombie Army’ of fake promoters and you can see how hype can quickly build:

[Fake bots] are simply computers talking to each other. The bot net owner will develop thousands of these accounts sand they then tweet, triggering one another to tweet and retweet based on an algorithm. It creates a domino effect and an upward spiral reseminging a viral effect, but in reality, it’s artificial

Paul Armstrong, technology advisers, Here/Forth

Conclusion: Word-of-mouth sensations appear to have been replaced by Word-of-bot recommendations, and it’s difficult to see how the social media platforms can shut these down quick enough…..a case of virtual ‘Whack-a-Mole’!