Bots and Shills on the net - ITT: We try to map the levels of deception on the net

Oerlikon

Oerlikon

Morbidly a beast
kiwifarms.net
Joined
Apr 17, 2022
With recent talk about bots dominating places like twitter, 4chan, and other social media sites i felt it was apropriate to start a discussion on the topic.

Bots are sometimes overt in their purpose shilling porn sites and the like, but the internet today is filled to the brim with the ones that seem to have a more sinister purpose.

Twitter bots have been going strong for a while. Strong political opinions or false information on the war in ukrain are nothing new. But im interested in seeing how deep the rabbit hole goes. The estimate of how many users are actually bots vary wildly from 40% to 70%. I have yet to see any of these numbers confirmed.

As for spammers, i would like to take 4chan as an example. It is no secret that it has been the fighting ground of fetishists and ideological extremists for years now. if you browse there for any length of time you will find there are seemingly organised efforts to post demoralising material like bbc-spam anti-america threads or 'anti-memes' like flart and seared bite.

Whilst some of that is definetly the consequence of unchecked autism it is undenieable that there is something going on there. So now wonder out loud; who are these people and what is their game?

But it would be fun to deep dive into this.
I would like to hear what you think, or know about these people or organisations.
 
  • Agree
  • Like
  • Thunk-Provoking
Reactions: Chester Rigby, L50LasPak, Pocket and 3 others
I barely use any social media any more, but of those I do still know, bots are only getting worse. Youtube for example. They've had bots for years, but before YT monetization there wasn't any true benefit, at least directly, from stealing and botting accounts. Nowadays especially with the population the site has now, effectively having had a monopoly on user submitted internet video for years, comment sections can absolutely be filled to the brim with them unless a channel makes it's own custom filter. GPT-3 has exacerbated this. Bots can now generate realistic conversations with themselves to avoid spam filters wiping their accounts out.

In other than social media terms, well I guess the label could technically apply these days, but gaming is also very deceiving now. Ignoring games that are developed to intentionally include faux users in order to fake it till they make it, we have random people ruining online play by generating thousands of bot accounts for games. The main one that comes to mind is TF2 but another Valve game, CS:GO, appears to share this problem. TF2 has had the worst time with it out of any game though. It's gotten to the point there are now fake bot servers that trap you in botted servers because the server listings are botted, the ping is faked, and joining any of these fake populated servers just keeps you where you are.
 
  • Like
Reactions: Based Cheeto and Maggots on a Train v2
Speaking of, there's plenty of wumao roaming social media.

1653211744446.png

50 Cent Party - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org en.wikipedia.org

Whenever you start criticizing Pooh and the CCP, surely at least 1 of these individuals will spring up.

 
  • Informative
  • Agree
  • Like
Reactions: Pillar of Autism, Chester Rigby, Smaug's Smokey Hole and 7 others
Having been mostly lurking in the Keffals thread, a lot of users there concluded that he uses bots for likes to ratio people. There's even some posts and tidbits that prove you can buy Twitter likes by the penny. I wonder how Elon will fix that issue.

As for other social media, aside from the obvious bots that plague it, I know there's a guy on 4chan that bots the /v/ drawthreads. That place is a shitshow in its own right.
Toolbox said:
Bots can now generate realistic conversations with themselves to avoid spam filters wiping their accounts out.
Click to expand...
This video covers the bot reply chain fairly well in my opinion. I think its an odd angle to be scamming people at compared to traditional methods. I imagine its not too costly, but this isn't my field of expertise either.
 
  • Informative
  • Agree
  • Like
Reactions: Chester Rigby, The Mass Shooter Ron Soye, Toolbox and 1 other person
Toolbox said:
I barely use any social media any more, but of those I do still know, bots are only getting worse. Youtube for example. They've had bots for years, but before YT monetization there wasn't any true benefit, at least directly, from stealing and botting accounts. Nowadays especially with the population the site has now, effectively having had a monopoly on user submitted internet video for years, comment sections can absolutely be filled to the brim with them unless a channel makes it's own custom filter. GPT-3 has exacerbated this. Bots can now generate realistic conversations with themselves to avoid spam filters wiping their accounts out.

In other than social media terms, well I guess the label could technically apply these days, but gaming is also very deceiving now. Ignoring games that are developed to intentionally include faux users in order to fake it till they make it, we have random people ruining online play by generating thousands of bot accounts for games. The main one that comes to mind is TF2 but another Valve game, CS:GO, appears to share this problem. TF2 has had the worst time with it out of any game though. It's gotten to the point there are now fake bot servers that trap you in botted servers because the server listings are botted, the ping is faked, and joining any of these fake populated servers just keeps you where you are.
Click to expand...
The tf2 bot situation was quite interesting from afar. When they unmasked that twighlight sparkle guy i thought that was a real KF moment. Sad to say it didnt really lead anywhere and the problem got worse because valve doesnt care.
 
  • Agree
  • Feels
Reactions: crows in guns and Toolbox
No One of Note said:
This video covers the bot reply chain fairly well in my opinion. I think its an odd angle to be scamming people at compared to traditional methods. I imagine its not too costly, but this isn't my field of expertise either.
Click to expand...
He or someone else may have covered it in a different video, but what I'm mentioning is bots making an inane rambling that has nothing to do with a video, but the chat is realistic enough to try and get some human points for the accounts or something. Hadn't heard of this name thing. Pretty stupid scam.
 
I have a YouTube channel, I've never done anything dirty or underhanded with it. A year or two ago, it obviously got onto a list of accounts that sub bots pump and dump to obscure the activity of their paying clients. The dump used to come 1 day after the pump. A few weeks ago, the dump started always coming 2 days after. If Google was serious about stamping this shit out, they could easily do it.
 
  • Informative
  • Like
  • Thunk-Provoking
Reactions: Pillar of Autism, L50LasPak, ks99 and 4 others
Noticed it during one of the various terrorist attacks that hit the UK in 2017. After each attack, twitter would be swamped with shill statements like "BNOT ALLL DA MUSLIMS ARE TERRORISTS!"/"they're the real vitctims her!!!", repeated word for word by thousands and thousands of accounts. Obviously a psy-op by Mi6 or some muslim state to project blame elsewhere.

My guess is that platforms allow this because they're not only in on the social engineering aspect of social media, but because it boosts their numbers which they then use to dupe gullible stock brokers and investors.

I don't use any of it now. Quit facefag in 2016, and the rest not long after. The last hold out was youtube, which I binged up to 16 hours a day during the pandemic. I don't even use that anymore. Sick to death of shill channels robbing a living reading news articles out loud or yamming on about culture war issues. If it ain't that, it's cunts like Jimmy Dore or Russell Brand monetising the obvious. "The world's fucked!" "Look how corrupt our political class is! MAKE SURE YOU LIKE AND SUBSCRIBE!". It's just all so nauseating and pedestrian, devoid of any creativity or soul.

My rule now is if I find myself mindlessly scrolling through an app or a website to find content, it's of no value to me. If I want to watch a particular video, I'll do a search on duckduckgo and watch it via an embedded video. The farms is my final sanctuary, it's a throw back to how the internet use to be and was always intended. I mean, you're all full of shit as much as any group, but at least I know where I stand here and for the most part, the dialogue is good natured and very informative. God bless you freaks.
 
Last edited:
  • Agree
  • Like
  • Informative
Reactions: Mr. Hedgehog, The Mass Shooter Ron Soye, Toolbox and 1 other person
>demoralising material like bbc-spam
This is the one thing that's been consistently spammed on quite a few boards, and I don't think it's just regular trolls. There's not near enough people who actually think its funny, black dudes who like to fling shit, and small-penis-humilation enthusiasts for the amount of posts I've seen. I'm sure you've seen the supposed leaks of Discord servers where BBC spam is coordinated on but I have no idea how legitimate those screenshots are. I'm inclined to think it's just forum sliding rather than "oy vey, promote miscegenation among ze goyim ehehehehe!".

On the other hand, I do think there is a surprising amount of people on 4chan effected by the trolling and spam (and I guess even regular posts on /pol/, which I also think are pretty much just spam at this point) who you wouldn't expect to be. Pic related:
1653374141677.png

1653374155356.png

Like, what retard would post their face like this? IIRC she said she had a racism fetish and I can only imagine she got it from internet retardation. Or maybe her boyfriend really did just call her the gamer word and she liked it, I dunno, but I feel like that would extend to "post on /pol/ for advice on how to get my bf to hate niggers (im black btw)". I don't think normal people do this. So is the propaganda/botnet working? What even would be the end goal if that's the case? What benefit does mistakenly thinking black dudes have huge dongs or enjoying your white boyfriend calling you a nigger serve anyone? It's just retarded. It's not like pro-Russia/China spam where there's a clear propaganda motive: "get western citizen to hate their own country and maybe even support ours".

Another thing I just was reminded of: footfaggotry. That shit was rightfully mocked forever, but in the past couple years I've seen so many e-whores post foot centric photos (primarily a retarded pose with their toes curled right up to the camera like a fucking macro shot) and it's fucking retarded looking. What the fuck happened there? No way footfags are that big of a market. No way. I don't believe it. There's a reason they were mocked endlessly, they're a tiny fraction of people whose fetish outright disgusts 99% of everyone else. What would the CIA (or anyone else) have to gain from footfaggotry though?
 
  • Thunk-Provoking
  • Like
  • Informative
Reactions: Based Cheeto, Chester Rigby, Pissmaster and 4 others
Un Platano said:
If you want to spam on 4chan at maximum efficiency, buy a 4chan pass. It removes the captchas so you can easily make a bot and the jannies will never touch a pass user's posts.
Click to expand...

ks99 said:
>demoralising material like bbc-spam
This is the one thing that's been consistently spammed on quite a few boards, and I don't think it's just regular trolls. There's not near enough people who actually think its funny, black dudes who like to fling shit, and small-penis-humilation enthusiasts for the amount of posts I've seen. I'm sure you've seen the supposed leaks of Discord servers where BBC spam is coordinated on but I have no idea how legitimate those screenshots are. I'm inclined to think it's just forum sliding rather than "oy vey, promote miscegenation among ze goyim ehehehehe!".

On the other hand, I do think there is a surprising amount of people on 4chan effected by the trolling and spam (and I guess even regular posts on /pol/, which I also think are pretty much just spam at this point) who you wouldn't expect to be. Pic related:
View attachment 3313927
View attachment 3313928
Like, what retard would post their face like this? IIRC she said she had a racism fetish and I can only imagine she got it from internet retardation. Or maybe her boyfriend really did just call her the gamer word and she liked it, I dunno, but I feel like that would extend to "post on /pol/ for advice on how to get my bf to hate niggers (im black btw)". I don't think normal people do this. So is the propaganda/botnet working? What even would be the end goal if that's the case? What benefit does mistakenly thinking black dudes have huge dongs or enjoying your white boyfriend calling you a nigger serve anyone? It's just retarded. It's not like pro-Russia/China spam where there's a clear propaganda motive: "get western citizen to hate their own country and maybe even support ours".

Another thing I just was reminded of: footfaggotry. That shit was rightfully mocked forever, but in the past couple years I've seen so many e-whores post foot centric photos (primarily a retarded pose with their toes curled right up to the camera like a fucking macro shot) and it's fucking retarded looking. What the fuck happened there? No way footfags are that big of a market. No way. I don't believe it. There's a reason they were mocked endlessly, they're a tiny fraction of people whose fetish outright disgusts 99% of everyone else. What would the CIA (or anyone else) have to gain from footfaggotry though?
Click to expand...
Im sure there are alot of trolls at play. And weird people exist. It takes maybe 10 or 15 active posters to fill a board with their specific fetish material.

I stay clear of pol because for one i am a filthy centrist and it only serves to make you angry. Angry people are easy to influence because they think and or act emotionally.

It would surprise me however if there were no gov shills on there, be they american chinese russian or whatever. Judging by the playbook of american alphabet boys alone id say chances are high that they are at least watching. What ever the goal might be i we might never know.

/k/ ever sinds the russian ukrain situation has been fucking unusable. From obviously fake videos to real videos out of context. Retards shilling for boths sides of the conflict with furious passion, which struck me as a bit strange because the posters i knew generally hate both sides of any conflict or dont care at all.
 
  • Like
Reactions: Chester Rigby
Mega Man 2 Intro - NES said:
You haven't met many black women have you?
Click to expand...
Are you implying black women are often retarded, have a racism fetish, or both?

I don't know if it was bots or just Youtube fudging things, but before public dislikes were yeeted entirely you would see a popular video get fucking ratio'd HARD, only for it to artificially receive a bunch of likes in a very short space of time that would serve to counter-balance it. This was usually some big gay corporate ad campaign (think the Gilette controversy) or a video made by Youtube themselves like the yearly Rewind.

Before I quit porn for good I browsed /gif/, and I stoppped browsing /gif/ even before I quit porn because holy shit I could not believe the proportion of incredibly niche content to "normal" shit. Always an active sissy hypno/cuck/BBC/gay/tranny thread no matter when I went. I refuse to believe these genres are THAT popular.
 
  • Agree
  • Like
Reactions: Wright, Pillar of Autism, Chester Rigby and 1 other person
I've unironically seen proof of botting on 4chan in the form of sudden posting rate plummets on the large boards during outages on Google Code along with the implementation of their current captcha system. I wouldn't be surprised if one could social engineer their way into suspected google accounts and discover whole code dumps dedicated to maintaining coomerism, barneyfag and political screeching.
 
  • Informative
Reactions: Smaug's Smokey Hole, Pissmaster, L50LasPak and 2 others
Sincere Sinner said:
I don't know if it was bots or just Youtube fudging things, but before public dislikes were yeeted entirely you would see a popular video get fucking ratio'd HARD, only for it to artificially receive a bunch of likes in a very short space of time that would serve to counter-balance it.
Click to expand...
It would inevitably get nuked anyways though when even that didn't work, without fail, 90% of the time. You can still see dislikes if you didn't know, with an addon. Might be chrome only. Quite a few people have been using it, even without an account you can see how many people are still willing to rate content past them nuking the api entirely.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back