Calibrating a 3D Printed Delta Arm for Screen Interaction | DFWORKS | Online Threat Mitigation
The battle between disinformation spreaders, propagandists, and automated social media activity, and the algorithms designed to detect and control them, is an ongoing arms race. While many expect it should be easy to distinguish human behaviour from bots, the reality is much more complex and challenging.
Through my research on forums like BlackHatWorld, I gained insight into how bot farmers and trolls evade detection. Techniques such as hex editing chromedriver to alter browser fingerprints and using device farms for physical and virtual automation at scale illustrate some tactics taken to influence at scale while avoiding detection. These findings led me to explore whether emulating human behaviour with robotics could offer an alternative and cost-effective solution for device automation at scale.
This article details my effort to convincingly and affordably emulate human like operation of a device, rather than just simulating application-level activity. Hiring real humans for such tasks is almost certainly prohibitively expensive (unless you’re Saudi Arabia), so affordable orchestration of human-like activity could facilitate large-scale influence operations or the countering of disinformation without the financial strain of hiring content creators.
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