Facebots As I use facebook more and more often, there arises a sneaking suspicion that perhaps many of my facebook

friends aren't the humans they purport themselves to be. Perhaps it's their profile pictures. They did, yes, once bear an image of a person doing human activity last time I checked, but now I'm starting to realize just how unhuman and digitized it's all becoming. How did I come to think this conclusion? Well, this is where it all started: my observation of the overly-trite newsfeed, which marked the beginning of my facebook-friend inquisition. After seeing my newfeed flooded with the same cliched phrases and the same variations of those phrases, I started to feel more and more as if I had only one friend -- and that one friend used facebook under the guise of many different user ID's, and many different profile pictures. Further intrigue pressed me onward to examining each person's wall -- and, sure enough, my experience with the newsfeed wasn't something that was just a passing illusion. The same statuses showed up over and over: "At <so-and-so location> with <so-and-so person> (or persons). Love you guys!" I started to wonder: who is the mastermind behind all of this? Surely these aren't my friends -something must have possessed them. Because if they were my friends, they would definitely have something more substantial to say then just repeating these same phrases over and over again. I was viewing my profile again, when suddenly something on the sidebar caught my eye. Glancing over to my friends list, I see my first (and final) suspect: "Robert." No profile picture, no last name -- just "Robert." With no info filled in at all on his profile page (in addition to having friends who I've never seen before, including some whose profile pictures showed Asian girls in tightly-clad bikinis -- come to think of it, Robert and I had no mutual friends at all), I suspected that maybe he was the person behind all of this. So, in an angrily written letter to his inbox, I wrote: Dear Robert: Are you just one person on facebook? Or are you many many people, going under the guise of many many different names and identities? Let me know now, you little rascal, so I can strangle the virtual daylights out of you and finally put an end to this hackneyed madness. After that, I never saw Robert again on my "friend's list," but same with the other 100+ friends who disappeared along with him. He must have committed virtual suicide. Later on, after recuperating from the heavy loss of some the most creative and genuine souls that I have ever kept in touch with, in reflection I talked about it with one of my real-life friends in the computer science department. We were on the discussion of "automated messaging," when I felt the need to bring up the incident. I told my friend about Robert, and the strange phenomena of seeing about 100 of my other friends disappear along with him. I also told him about the abnormal lack of originality on facebook statuses and facebook wall posts before his tragic death. My friend laughed at this. "Boy," he said, "are you slow." He later told me about his experience long ago with the same Robert (except, he said, back then he was called "Xiu Xiu"). On and on he went about how his friends inexplicably increased in number day by day, in addition to his observing how people were posting more or less the same comments on each other's statuses: 'lol,' 'hahaha,' 'love it.' "By then," he said, "I just had to do some inspection." Finally, he explained how he reached the conclusion that "Xiu Xiu," was, in fact, behind all of this. He deleted her as a friend, over half of his personal facebook population decreased, and once again, he was back to living a happy and satisfied virtual existence. After ruminating over this for a bit together, we asked each other the question, if "Robert" does, in fact, have a vendetta against the facebook world and all those inhabited therein, then why? And if so, how does he even have the time and the energy to invest inflicting torture upon the human

mind with all these offensive trappings of banality? We thought about for a while, and then, as we were casually glancing down at an open computer programming text-book, it finally clicked. Aha! we exclaimed. Robert isn't a real person, but a BOT! Bot is the short name for "robot." But not physical robots -- digital robots. Computer programs that send automated messages and do programmed tasks (specifically internet related ones). In this case, this robot posted on other people's walls (or on variations of his own wall, actually) and generated statuses based upon cleverly-devised computer algorithms. He also automatically generated new e-mails, and new user profiles with random, photoshop-tweaked images to serve as profile pictures. Why, the little devil knew it best that if different pictures were displayed (although they all had the same poses and the same expressions on their faces), the real users of facebook would never realize that their facebook world was flooded with the unkind effects of a malicious computer program. "Man, whoever designed this 'Robert' bot was an ingenius skank!" we both chorused, after realizing that Robert was indeed a bot. Not only was Robert a bot, but so was the 100 or so friends that he self-replicated onto my friends list. Robert was a digital virus, and an annoying one at that. How the heck was he able to do some of the stuff he did? Well, the status-generating and the automatic commenting was basically a given -- my friend and I figured that one out in a jiffy. Here are some of the algorithms that we came up with as a possible explanation of some Bot-bert's inner workings (and of all the other bots like him, of which there are *plenty*): To generate a status on the newsfeed: Choose from a list of common, feel-good status patterns: "At <location> with <person>," or "Eating <good food> at <location> with <person>" or "Hanging out with <person>" "<person> is awesome," or "<any phrase that means "life is good">" For the location, append some popular feel-good phrases, such as "Love you" or "You guys are awesome," to the end of that pattern (of course, varying it by using synonyms for "love" and "awesome," whether they be slang or formal, a single word or a phrase). Or: Search these online databases: Internent news sources like CNN and Yahoo! Weather.com Sports (e.g., ESPN), Games If news source or sports: Grab the title of the article, and grab a random comment (preferrably one with a common opinion). If Weather: Grab the temperature in degrees Farhenheit Using Literary-combinative technology, fuse the opinion and the comment together to generate an opinion (for news). For sports, find out what game is currently being played, and pick a random team (this will be the team that will be rooted for in the status). For weather, match the temperature with it's respective evaluation (i.e, 70-80 is perfect in Oklahoma, 50-60 is hot for New Englanders). Or: Just generate a random sentence (<random subject> <random verb>). Intelligence

value or even comprehensibility doesn't need to be detected before submitting it to the "status queue." Generate the status (that has top priority on the status queue). Play with the relationship status modifier every once in a while. Of course, what that would mean is that all the statuses would be based off of old and already-established places or events (or they would *all* be really unintelligent); and of course, if nothing new, profound, creative, or even controversial comes up, then there is more reason to suspect "bot." However, Bert-bot's programmer was very clever in the way that he knew this -- so, he enabled it to use a nifty random quote grabber: Pick a random quote online (e.g., brainquote.com, thinkexist.com, etc.), preferrably one that is very profound but very well-known at the same time. Generate the status. At times, this may be particularly "enlightening" to the bot community, as everyone likes the quote but doesn't comment on it (processing abstract data of the unfamiliar or the profound kind like this for the sake of coming up with an intelligent comment would crash the processor on which the bot runs). Bots, after all, only process *familiar* information. However, since most statuses aren't of the academic type, the average bot will be able to reply appropriately. Comments with lone words such as 'lol' and 'hahaha' and the occasional 'congrats!' all serve properly to fill up the bot's arsenal of responses for the most sophisticated statuses. Of course, since new slang words trend to popularity each new day, the bot is aptly equiped with a 'trope update' function, to replace all the old slang with the new. Therefore, the bot always looks up to date, socially acclimatized -- as all bots should and must (although I personally disagree -- if the programmer makes each bot different, the next time I wouldn't have called "bot" on everyone). Wall posts also reek of that familiar stench now discovered to have been stale and long-expired banality, as the walls were just smeared with these overly-trite phrases that causes them all to blend in with each other. My guess for this one is that the bot's wall-writing function was in close vein with the following procedure: 1) choose a random friend from the friend list, 2a) pick from a variety of stock phrases ("miss you," "how you doin' girl?") -OR- 2b) something incomprehendible (the illusion of an "inside joke") -OR- 2c) post a random video from youtube, and finally 3) putting that phrase through the "variation" function to transform the basic phrase into something more elaborate ("miss you" becomes "missin' you way too much!" -- "how you doin' girl?" becomes "you're just havin' way too much fun over in <location>, aren't you girl?"). More variety decreases suspicion, as the general rule has always held in the world of frauds. *Note: Bots generally become exposed on their birthdays -- becoming more and more apparent to the rest of us humans that they are, in fact, not members of the homo sapien species. Apparently, as my friend and I had discovered (or speculated, rather), there was a *bug* in the code, specifically in the "variation" function, that caused the base stock-phrase "Happy Birthday!" to not transform into something more variant, and in the "friend-eliminator" function -- causing ALL friends to post those eye-irritating repetitions. Instead, "Happy Birthday!" just remains "Happy Birthday!" although bot programmers were alerted by this as they saw one wall post flooded with 400+ of this phrase (all of them having exclamation points as well). So, in an attempt to fix the code, they made some modifications -- and the evidence of that is seen in more variety nowadays ("Have a happy birthday!" instead of the original), but still, some of us more intelligent humans have debunked the myth that all facebook users are "human."