Today, social media bots are increasingly easy to create and hard to detect. The Financial Standard run through several twitter accounts associated with several high profile bloggers and influencers and found that a large portion of them to be bots. In addition to this, social media bots have the ability to distort stock market valuations. In one instance in the US, bots were used to create social media chatter around a listed company artificially raising the stock price with investors losing millions in losses once the anomaly was rectified. For communication experts and social media analysts, the Westgate attack was a case study of the danger posed by unfiltered information shared across networks faster than users can possibly verify.

Source: Standard Digital April 18, 2017 05:48 UTC