The Dead Internet Theory

[Retink]

I think this is probably true, since 4chan has just turned into spam for the most part, which is probably why they changed over to their new captcha system.

One thing I always found interesting, was a talk I heard about how people would use spam efficiently to hurt websites, with one one version being cloning real chat rooms or threads and then deploying them as a bot at a later date. That way messages would seem genuine, because they were at one time, but anyone trying to interact with them would feel very alienated as all of this "real" interaction was happening without acknowledging them. This is probably less of an issue in some cases, but imagine this being used on users of sites that are shadow banned, they can be put into a quarantine where everything they see is something that happened years ago but is being replicated using bots.

We also know many big names in social media buy subscribers as "social proof" and many new fledgling sites use fake interaction and subscriber growth on user accounts to drive early growth. I wouldn't be surprised if just like fiat currency a lot of the social media interaction was being inflated over time using various methods and actual pool of people interacting outside of a very casual glance to look something up was far smaller than we assumed.

 

[Maggots on a Train v2]

---

I think this is probably true, since 4chan has just turned into spam for the most part, which is probably why they changed over to their new captcha system.

One thing I always found interesting, was a talk I heard about how people would use spam efficiently to hurt websites, with one one version being cloning real chat rooms or threads and then deploying them as a bot at a later date. That way messages would seem genuine, because they were at one time, but anyone trying to interact with them would feel very alienated as all of this "real" interaction was happening without acknowledging them. This is probably less of an issue in some cases, but imagine this being used on users of sites that are shadow banned, they can be put into a quarantine where everything they see is something that happened years ago but is being replicated using bots.

We also know many big names in social media buy subscribers as "social proof" and many new fledgling sites use fake interaction and subscriber growth on user accounts to drive early growth. I wouldn't be surprised if just like fiat currency a lot of the social media interaction was being inflated over time using various methods and actual pool of people interacting outside of a very casual glance to look something up was far smaller than we assumed.

Morons like Lilijean will buy millions of likes from blank accounts, but I'm sure many real talent agencies have the time and money to create thousands of accounts with just enough sparse original content to look like real people. The smarter fakes would interact with non-customers, then ruin their inflated stats by moving on.

 

[Retink]

---

Morons like Lilijean will buy millions of likes from blank accounts, but I'm sure many real talent agencies have the time and money to create thousands of accounts with just enough sparse original content to look like real people. The smarter fakes would interact with non-customers, then ruin their inflated stats by moving on.

What's interesting about the bots you mentioned is that it's a widely known thing as well, as people will complain on different sites that they random lost a couple hundred subscribers in one day out of the blue and the answer is always that youtube is doing another bot purge. This happens constantly, so it's a bit of a cycle where even channels with a few thousand subscribers have some 1-10% of those being bots that they didn't buy.

 

[Maggots on a Train v2]

A good YT bot purge can eclipse months of growth for smaller accounts. It makes you wonder how many YT profiles are even real, even most real profiles are completely empty. At least Instagram and Facebook accounts usually have something there.

I've wondered how much money there would be in providing packages of 1000 generic daily life photos. All you really need are 3-4 original snapshots, and an account looks lived in.

 

[Happy Fish]

tbh if you think bots are fucking up discourse and not shill groups that have been exposed repeatedly, I don't know what to tell you.

All the same on 4chan the umpteenth version of the same stupid disinfo thread is definitely something you could script

 

[moocow]

tbh if you think bots are fucking up discourse and not shill groups that have been exposed repeatedly, I don't know what to tell you.

It's both. Shill groups are (currently) more effective at disrupting things but they're more expensive, too. Bots aren't as good at it, but they're getting better and they're certainly cheaper. Eventually the tech will improve to the point that they're indistinguishable from the average consoomer, politisperg or influencer and the shill group gigs will dry up fast.

 

[12FluidOunces]

It's both. Shill groups are (currently) more effective at disrupting things but they're more expensive, too. Bots aren't as good at it, but they're getting better and they're certainly cheaper. Eventually the tech will improve to the point that they're indistinguishable from the average consoomer, politisperg or influencer and the shill group gigs will dry up fast.

I'd argue that bots are *way* more prevalent and more effective than you think. Shill groups get exposed because they're human and they fuck up every now and then. Bots just churn and churn and churn.

It's all speculation of course - considering the effort that is estimated to be at play I doubt we'll ever know.

 

[ditto]

I can't be the only one who noticed them.

I've seen spam comments having "organic" conversations with each other but it always ends in a link to another spam video or the WhatsApp number of a "financial advisor" or some other scammer.

It could be the YouTube spam algo is only removing the comments with the links and keeping the thread, at least until the spam accounts are removed.

 

[DDBCAE CBAADCBE]

 

[12FluidOunces]

Hacker News had an entry the other day containing a link to the U.S. Army's "Psychological Operations Division" (Motto: "Persuade, Change, Influence")

Psychological Operations | Hacker News

news.ycombinator.com

Psychological Operations | Hacker News

archived 3 Mar 2022 17:36:13 UTC

archive.ph

Psychological Operations

Also known as PSYOPS, these Soldiers are communication experts who persuade allies and enemies in the nation’s best interest.

www.goarmy.com

Psychological Operations | goarmy.com

archived 3 Mar 2022 00:10:37 UTC

archive.ph

The discussion was interesting and had someone who claimed to be a former PsyOp guy doing an impromptu AMA:

Former PsyOp guy here with OEF experience, now working in cybersecurity. Please feel welcome to ask me (almost!) anything, and I'll do my best to respond.
edit - this TTP FM [0] (warning, PDF ahead) seems to be freely available, and gives a comprehensive overview of what PsyOp actually does in the modern US Army. Perhaps most relevant for today is propaganda analysis and the SCAME method, a multi-faceted approach to determining information about enemy capabilities and intentions.
[0] - https://irp.fas.org/doddir/army/fm3-05-301.pdf

Linked PDF -- https://archive.ph/tsW9g

Some notable quotes:

> How much warfare is currently happening on social media sites, nationally operated or otherwise?
Plenty. Likely more than you or even I realize. That said...

> Are sites like 4chan, facebook, reddit or twitter very influenced by governmental PsyOp operations, national or foreign?
Foreign gov't, certainly. Ours? As honestly as I can claim, I never knew of any Psyop folks conducting operations on those sites, nor did I ever hear of any directives for Psyop folks to use those platforms as viable mediums.
US citizens are eternally out of scope for Army psychological operations, but I have almost no experience with influence operations conducted by a few Virginia-based agencies. Not saying CIA or NSA do such things, but I wouldn't be surprised if they were.

> one of the most successful PsyOp propaganda tactics is that of controlled dissent
I would mildly disagree here. Personally, in-group / out-group mentality is the easiest to manufacture and exploit, and serves as a fantastic emotional distraction from other areas.

Honestly, my hypothesis (as I have no discrete data) is that sites like reddit, twitter, HN, tumbler, etc. already have CIA / NSA / "DoD" people both on staff and as participatory users, likely volunteer moderators / admins as well.
When you start to think about how many other foreign countries are doing the exact same thing, well, you start wanting to use social media a lot less.

...and more than a few people accusing each other of falling for various psy-ops.

 

[AmpleApricots]

...and more than a few people accusing each other of falling for various psy-ops.

Everything of this could be (and probably is to some degree) true and at the same time, the guy writing all this might be some 16 year old high schooler from Idaho dreaming it all up. With the Internet, you just don't know.

I think the big problem and underlying issue is that people take the internet too seriously. I wonder why that is really. In the early days it was common knowledge to not believe everything (or really much of anything) you read online. This seems to have changed in recent years to "it's written in a professional looking font, so it must be true!". It's like some mental barrier fell and people have completely forgotten how to filter information and just value it all the same, which is a huge mistake to make. Or maybe people in general were always this dumb. Maybe that one TV spot promising your hair back if you massage your scalp with some electronic gizmo really worked because people actually believe that shit. Who knows.

Politisperging is also at an all time high, and it really seems like some kind of brain disease where people just can't help themselves. Hell, you'd just have to shoot a few random words about any of the hot-buttom topics into this thread and could start an unrelated pages-and-pages long discussion between edgelord autists with chinese cartoon female avatars that'll lead absolutely nowhere. I personally just don't really discuss things on the internet anymore. Waste of time and at the end of the day I just don't really give a shit what some random stranger thinks, even if he might agree with me. I think the only winning move is not to play.

 

[GoPro]

Hacker News had an entry the other day containing a link to the U.S. Army's "Psychological Operations Division" (Motto: "Persuade, Change, Influence")

Psychological Operations | Hacker News

news.ycombinator.com

Psychological Operations | Hacker News

archived 3 Mar 2022 17:36:13 UTC

archive.ph

Psychological Operations

Also known as PSYOPS, these Soldiers are communication experts who persuade allies and enemies in the nation’s best interest.

www.goarmy.com

Psychological Operations | goarmy.com

archived 3 Mar 2022 00:10:37 UTC

archive.ph

The discussion was interesting and had someone who claimed to be a former PsyOp guy doing an impromptu AMA:

Linked PDF -- https://archive.ph/tsW9g

Some notable quotes:





...and more than a few people accusing each other of falling for various psy-ops.

Reddit had confirmed U.S. military activity for years. The site used to release announcements and blogs about stats and other similar things. One of them was this blog post from 2013 revealing that the city most addicted to reddit is Eglin Air Force Base.
https://web.archive.org/web/2016060...5/get-ready-for-global-reddit-meetup-day.html
Here's a related PDF talking about Elgin bases' activities and astroturfing:

Wayback Machine

Something related to this is reddit's warrant canary. It disappeared from reddit's transparency records in 2016.

Reddit deletes surveillance 'warrant canary' in transparency report |…

archived 21 Feb 2022 11:20:00 UTC

archive.ph

There is also this blog post discussing pentagon's work involving propaganda on the internet, and it sources several news stories that surfaced over the years:

US Military Admits Spending Millions to Study Manipulation of Social …

archived 27 Mar 2016 06:01:28 UTC

archive.ph

Everything of this could be (and probably is to some degree) true and at the same time, the guy writing all this might be some 16 year old high schooler from Idaho dreaming it all up. With the Internet, you just don't know.

I think the big problem and underlying issue is that people take the internet too seriously. I wonder why that is really. In the early days it was common knowledge to not believe everything (or really much of anything) you read online. This seems to have changed in recent years to "it's written in a professional looking font, so it must be true!". It's like some mental barrier fell and people have completely forgotten how to filter information and just value it all the same, which is a huge mistake to make. Or maybe people in general were always this dumb. Maybe that one TV spot promising your hair back if you massage your scalp with some electronic gizmo really worked because people actually believe that shit. Who knows.

Politisperging is also at an all time high, and it really seems like some kind of brain disease where people just can't help themselves. Hell, you'd just have to shoot a few random words about any of the hot-buttom topics into this thread and could start an unrelated pages-and-pages long discussion between edgelord autists with chinese cartoon female avatars that'll lead absolutely nowhere. I personally just don't really discuss things on the internet anymore. Waste of time and at the end of the day I just don't really give a shit what some random stranger thinks, even if he might agree with me. I think the only winning move is not to play.

Internet's culture started to shift in 2007. By 2010, people were posting their photos, used their real names, started taking things others say on the web too seriously, and began to reveal personal details online. All of those things used to be understood as something you should not do under any circumstances, but have now become commonplace. Expected even.
It's a bit of a meme that iphone ruined the internet, but it certainly had an adverse effect. Facebook and twitter followed soon after, and they caused even more damage. There were other shifts caused by internet's increasing ease of access, but there was nothing on that scale since the advent of the Eternal September.

 

[Amerimutt]

post example

I've finally got one. Don't ask why I was looking at frequency tones but here's an example:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RiadzGhQHTw

The video is just a constant tone for a whole hour so there is absolutely nothing special happening at "35:03" and then there is another account which has replied saying how he actually skipped to that part ")))". These two are clearly bots.

A podcast hosted by two Irish teens apparently. There are zero videos on this channel (https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCHiUFLhXSFokZ59u9dHCubQ) and only two subscribers. What's interesting is that this account joined in 2013 so either this was a genuine account which is now compromised or bots have been stockpiling alternative accounts for a long time. The other account joined in 2011 so again probably an abandoned account which has been hijacked.

 

[AmpleApricots]

Don't ask why I was looking at frequency tones

Tinnitus?

These two are clearly bots.

You find these kinds of messages under any youtube video that's repetitive and long. I think it is what humanoids refer to as "joke".

 

[Amerimutt]

post example

In-case anybody was doubtful I now present more evidence from a less obscure video:

I've caught two-in-one here. Darryl Jr Wilson has posted two timestamps, one right aftert the other, with zero context. A one second difference between the two and there is nothing significant about those times in the video. Now Maureen ONeil is posting pure gibberish. At a first glance those two comments may come across as a genuine but when you take a moment to read them you will realise they don't make any sense at all.

Lewynd Nishel might be a bot too but I can't really say for sure as a lot of normies like to post a song's entire lyrics in their comments.

As I was scrolling down I found more gibberish from "Maureen ONeil" with a genuine comment by somebody else to compare to and I was going to say "sandwiched between two genuine comments" but I don't think Bradly Pilkerton is genuine either...

 

[Pissmaster]

In-case anybody was doubtful I now present more evidence from a less obscure video:

I've caught two-in-one here. Darryl Jr Wilson has posted two timestamps, one right aftert the other, with zero context. A one second difference between the two and there is nothing significant about those times in the video. Now Maureen ONeil is posting pure gibberish. At a first glance those two comments may come across as a genuine but when you take a moment to read them you will realise they don't make any sense at all.
View attachment 3085523

Lewynd Nishel might be a bot too but I can't really say for sure as a lot of normies like to post a song's entire lyrics in their comments.

As I was scrolling down I found more gibberish from "Maureen ONeil" with a genuine comment by somebody else to compare to and I was going to say "sandwiched between two genuine comments" but I don't think Bradly Pilkerton is genuine either...
View attachment 3085563

My guess is that Maureen ONeill let her kid watch YouTube on her phone while she was having sex with @Shiversblood, and the kid kept pressing whatever words popped up on autocomplete and pressed Submit every now and then to clear the screen

 

[Bad Take Crucifier]

There are many examples of much of the Internet being a... massive bot net, here's an example of how someone tested this on 4chan.

 

[ABE LINN COHN]

There are many examples of much of the Internet being a... massive bot net, here's an example of how someone tested this on 4chan.

View attachment 3086247

You know there's always the possibility that replies below the first are just trolls pretending to be bots. At least I hope they are.

 

[Bad Take Crucifier]

You know there's always the possibility that replies below the first are just trolls pretending to be bots. At least I hope they are.

You can recreate this for yourself. This experiment has been replicated multiple times and there's certainly enough evidence of bots and paid shills that you have no hope of it only being trolls.

I have a much more convincing example. Reddit. Did you know that one time, users caught these bots posting on a completely wrong post, spamming it with politics meant for a completely different post?

https://imgur.com/Q4LoTRd

Local archive, warning, long as fuck

 

[Wright]

Not sure this is adding much, but being a related topic here's a random example of weirdly extensive NFT bot back-and-forth spam on I stumbled across on YouTube . I've seen bot conversation on videos before but not usually this long. Weird.




Video: