1 Big Data and the rise of bots in social media Ricardo Murer Escola Superior de Propaganda e Marketing - ESPM Rua Joaquim Távora, 1240, SP - Brazil { ricardo.murer@espm.br } October 8th, 2017 Abstract Big Data is one of the most relevant areas for social media. On the one hand, it allows owners of social networking sites (SNSs) to find, from the use of algorithms and bots, patterns of behavior of their users, thus increasing their degree of segmentation and accuracy in advertising campaigns. On the other, it represents a new frontier for the online relationship with the client. This article aims to show how Big Data has helped to boost the rise of bots in social media and the implications of our growing relationship with these artificial autonomous agents. Keywords: Big Data, bots, automation, social media, social networks, artificial intelligence, AI, Web 2.0 Introduction Web 2.0 refers to a wide range of tools (O'REILLY, 2005) which allows the creation and sharing of content and interaction among its users. Social networking sites (SNSs) can be objectively defined as a collection of Web 2.0 tools and resources for networking friends (BOYD and ELLISON, 2007). The Big Data generated in SNSs by millions of users represents the focus of this article, but it is essential to quote that the phenomenon extends to all areas where monitoring and data capture systems are installed. The challenge that Big Data presents is precisely to remove from this growing mass of data and relevant information, able to increase knowledge about information producers and consequently increase the revenues of advertising-based SRS or help in the creation of new business. "Analyzing comments, searches or online postings can produce almost the same results for statistical inference as household surveys and demographic censuses" (HILBERT, 2013:7). If in the past the task of selecting, collecting, sorting and filtering data was performed by database experts from the use of Structured Query Language (SQL), this is now the assignment of bots based on artificial intelligence. As we will see in this article, the reach of the bots is extending to other areas, especially in the social media 1 and SNSs, where due to the volume of access, content production and speed of interactions, there is a need for automated solutions for business or relationship activities. The Big Data's increasingly accurate analysis of personal content and social interactions, combined with artificial intelligence (AI) techniques, are driving the development of a new generation of social bots, especially in SNSs, which are able to simulate similar behavior to ours. 1 Social media is a broad term which encompasses different user interaction spaces, such as instant messengers, forums, blogs, and SNSs.