A votebot is a
software automation built to fraudulently participate in
online poll
An open-access poll is a type of opinion poll in which a nonprobability sample of participants self-select into participation. The term includes call-in, mail-in, and some online polls.
The most common examples of open-access polls ask people to ...
s,
election
An election is a formal group decision-making process whereby a population chooses an individual or multiple individuals to hold Public administration, public office.
Elections have been the usual mechanism by which modern representative d ...
s, and to
upvote and downvote on
social media
Social media are interactive technologies that facilitate the Content creation, creation, information exchange, sharing and news aggregator, aggregation of Content (media), content (such as ideas, interests, and other forms of expression) amongs ...
.
Simple votebots are easy to code and deploy, yet they are often effective against many polls online, as the developer of the poll software must take this kind of attack into account and do extra work to defend against it.
Technique used
The
WWW
The World Wide Web (WWW or simply the Web) is an information system that enables Content (media), content sharing over the Internet through user-friendly ways meant to appeal to users beyond Information technology, IT specialists and hobbyis ...
uses the
HTTP protocol to transfer information. Votebots are designed to imitate legitimate user behaviour, such as voting in an online poll by interacting with the server hosting the poll using the HTTP protocol. The bot thus emulates the behavior of a human using a
web browser
A web browser, often shortened to browser, is an application for accessing websites. When a user requests a web page from a particular website, the browser retrieves its files from a web server and then displays the page on the user's scr ...
, but can repeat this emulated behavior many times, thus casting many votes.
Distinguishing bots from humans
In many voting projects, developers try to distinguish bots from legitimate users. For example, some websites restrict the number of votes one IP address can make in a time period. Votebots frequently bypass this rule by using proxy or VPN IP addresses. Other web sites analyze the account created by a votebot and its history of actions in the system to identify potential votebots. Votebots in turn counter this by trying to simulate human activity such as logging in and out before voting. Other sites employ
CAPTCHA
Completely Automated Public Turing Test to tell Computers and Humans Apart (CAPTCHA) ( ) is a type of challenge–response authentication, challenge–response turing test used in computing to determine whether the user is human in order to de ...
s, which votebots farm out to
Mechanical Turk
The Mechanical Turk, also known as the Automaton Chess Player (, ; ), or simply The Turk, was a fraudulent chess-playing Chess engine, machine constructed in 1770, which appeared to be able to play a strong game of chess against a human oppone ...
s.
Targeted sites
YouTube
YouTube is an American social media and online video sharing platform owned by Google. YouTube was founded on February 14, 2005, by Steve Chen, Chad Hurley, and Jawed Karim who were three former employees of PayPal. Headquartered in ...
,
Facebook
Facebook is a social media and social networking service owned by the American technology conglomerate Meta Platforms, Meta. Created in 2004 by Mark Zuckerberg with four other Harvard College students and roommates, Eduardo Saverin, Andre ...
,
Twitter
Twitter, officially known as X since 2023, is an American microblogging and social networking service. It is one of the world's largest social media platforms and one of the most-visited websites. Users can share short text messages, image ...
and
Reddit
Reddit ( ) is an American Proprietary software, proprietary social news news aggregator, aggregation and Internet forum, forum Social media, social media platform. Registered users (commonly referred to as "redditors") submit content to the ...
are major target of votebots.
Many small, temporary voting projects are also targeted. Many people try to program or buy malicious scripts to vote for themselves in some processes, and it is hard to count the number of attacks happening every day.
See also
*
Chatterbot
*
Dead Internet theory
*
IRC bot
409px, An IRC bot performing a simple task.An IRC bot is a set of scripts or an independent program that connects to Internet Relay Chat as a client, and so appears to other IRC users as another user. An IRC bot differs from a regular client in ...
*
Knowbot
*
Spambot
References
{{Reflist
Internet bots
Internet Protocol based network software