Exploring the Controlled Experiment by Social Bots

With the continuous development of digital media, people receive more and more information on the Internet. The emergence and development of social bots, on the one hand, serve human beings, on the other hand, cause the pollution of the network environment. Therefore, more and more researches begin to focus on social bots. In this chapter, we first introduce the concept of social bots, including the definition, application and influence. Then we introduce the needed technologies to deploy social bots on social networks and summarize four methods to detect social bots. We mainly analyze the feasibility of social bot as a controlled experiment to study social network, and review some existing research results.