Socialbots

The Social Mediator forum was created to bridge the gaps between the theory and practice of social media research and development. The articles are intended to promote greater awareness of new insights and experiences in the rapidly evolving domain of social media, some of which may influence perspectives and approaches in the more established areas of human-computer interaction. Each article in the forum is made up of several short contributions from people representing different perspectives on a particular topic. Previous installments of this forum have woven together diverse perspectives on the ways that social media is transforming relationships among different stakeholders in the realms of healthcare and government. The current article highlights some of the ways social robots (socialbots) ---programs that operate autonomously on social networking sites---are transforming relationships within those sites, and how these transformations may more broadly influence relationships among people and organizations in the future. A recent article in Communications of the ACM called "The Social Life of Robots" reported that "researchers have started to explore the possibilities of 'social' machines capable of working together with minimal human supervision" 1. That article illuminates recent developments involving interactions between humans and robots in the physical world; this article focuses on the interactions between humans and robots in the virtual world. Our authors are exploring and expanding the frontiers of designing, deploying, and analyzing the behavior and impact of robots operating in online social networks, and they have invited a number of other frontierspeople to share some of their insights, experiences, and future expectations for social robotics.