  Online social networks (OSN) like Twitter or Facebook are popular and
powerful since they allow reaching millions of users online. They are also a
popular target for socialbot attacks. Without a deep understanding of the
impact of such attacks, the potential of online social networks as an
instrument for facilitating discourse or democratic processes is in jeopardy.
In this extended abstract we present insights from a live lab experiment in
which social bots aimed at manipulating the social graph of an online social
network, in our case Twitter. We explored the link creation behavior between
targeted human users and our results suggest that socialbots may indeed have
the ability to shape and influence the social graph in online social networks.
However, our results also show that external factors may play an important role
in the creation of social links in OSNs.
