This round of bot posters just woke up:
Apepollo11@lemmy.world 1 week ago
Honestly, with the state of many questions posted here, I’d be surprised if there wasn’t a fair number of bots posting here.
One user in particular, has a posting history that is highly sus.
WhiteRabbit@lemmy.today 1 week ago
HubertManne@piefed.social 6 days ago
those don’t look like anything to me.
FinjaminPoach@lemmy.world 1 week ago
When i see the sus posting history people i assume they’re just trolls though, or engaging in a roleplaying fetish.
Is there a specific reason why someone would choose to target this site with fake engagement bots? The most obvious types of bots are the ones that come on here directly advertising something, e.g “this person writes great CVs / Code! Reach out to Botted Name at linkedin or BottedName@gmail.com to learn more! Buzzword Buzzword Buzzword.” They get quickly removed and don’t come often, so you might not have seen them.
But I just don’t see what value is made from bots that pretend to be people. Is it because they’re researching how to imitate human posters? Or do they just gather data based on how people respond? Sorry I’m kind of uncreative when it comes to this stuff.
Bougie_Birdie@piefed.blahaj.zone 1 week ago
I see basically two nefarious reasons for bots to pretend to be people on lemmy. I can’t think of a good reason why you’d want them.
A company shilling it’s product by appearing like a regular person. Bots have already ruined user reviews for products in basically every consumer industry. The best way to discover decent products now is word-of-mouth, so I could see a bot that pretends to be a user so it can show up in recommendation threads, like in Ask Lemmy or Buy It For Life.
The propaganda potential for bot users is tremendous. Kind of like the company shilling its product but on a grander scale. This could be orchestrated by those with economic interests, like promoting car-centric culture or climate change denialism which is of great interest to the oil industry. Or it could be as grand as foreign or domestic influence interfering with elections.
The fediverse isn’t a huge place, but it’s not nothing either. Operating costs are technically lower because you wouldn’t need to use as many bots to infiltrate communities. You could even spin up your own instances so that your own bots don’t get banned. I’m not really sure how you’d go about countering this sort of problem.