The Language of Deception

Appendix ABot Automation

This appendix provides some technical details on how bots are commonly engineered and deployed on social networking platforms. These details are provided because they are important to understand how LLMs can and will be weaponized across the Internet. The explanation of these techniques and technologies is exclusively for the educational purpose of providing better contextual understanding.

This text should not be misconstrued as an encouragement to the reader to create their own bots. In many cases, the creation and use of bots is, at the very least, a violation of the technology platforms' Terms of Service (ToS), and can get you or your account banned from the respective platform. In some cases, depending on the laws and/or regulations of your local area, such activities might also be illegal. Nothing in this book should be construed as legal advice, and you should make a point to independently understand the laws and regulations that you specifically are subject to.

The most effective way to build bots is by using either browser emulation or browser automation. Browser emulation is the use of non-browser software (usually simple scripts), which use the de facto web protocol—Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP)—to execute targeted requests to web services, which ordinarily would be achieved through a browser. Browser automation is connecting to the drivers (the “APIs”) of an actual user browser (like Chrome or Firefox) to automate browser interactions. ...