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

Stoneheart said:
im not as sure as i was a couple of weeks ago that we are surrounded by bots.
have you guys looked into chinese clickfarms?
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As wild as click farms are, they dont operate with any other motive than making money, i have a mainland friend. She says she has worked in a click farm for a few weeks. That was purely instagram likes.

I would reccomend "this is not propaganda" by peter pomerantsev. He talks about the use of social media in coordinating riots and revolutions. And also touches on the use of bots to propagate anti government sentiments.

And if you can stand the selfsatisfied cumfarts of a litteral gay cripple, you can try "mindf*ck". I couldnt bring myself to finish it as the writer has a lot of trouble staying objective and treats anyone who doesnt vote the same as he does like a misguided child.
 
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Back when I was in university, early 2000s, I used to make posts for this company between classes. Here's how it worked, let's say you had a forum like the Farms and you want it to appear as if there's a lot of activity to attract new users. You'd buy a block of posts from this company who would send users like me to your site to fill your order. In turn, the company would pay me five cents a post, sending a paypal payment when you reached $20. You'd just link your username on a target forum, start a bunch of slapfights and make like $2 killing time on the computer between classes. I was doing it more for something to do than for the money as it only paid around a dollar an hour. After a month or so you could buy some random shit on ebay out of what they paid you.

Now that was before the Internet was highly commercialized and politicized and people where just looking for users for their little personal forums.

I'm pretty sure today they pay people to go to Reddit, 4Chan, Youtube or other social media sites and make posts promoting particular political ideas. So many of the people you'd get in slapfights with on Reddit or Youtube are probably just getting paid five or ten cents to post a counterpoint to your political argument in order to push certain ideas on behalf of a political think tank.

I'm also pretty sure a lot of articles on sites like Huffington Post, Ars Technica, videos on Youtube etc are paid for by either corporations who want to promote their products, think tanks who want to promote their political ideas or PR firms who want to promote specific people.

The mainstream internet has just become a series of people getting paid like a dollar an hour to gaslight you into buying into ideas, people and products.

Maybe bots have gotten more sophisticated and instead of paying Indians and students a dollar an hour, you just give these companies money and the set up a fleet of shill bots to push your shit, I don't know. I know I've run into my fair share of posters on site like Reddit who will repeat a talking point over and over in political discussions. They'll word it a little differently each time they reply to someone, but never reply to anyone who offers a counterpoint.
 
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Never Scored said:
Back when I was in university, early 2000s, I used to make posts for this company between classes. Here's how it worked, let's say you had a forum like the Farms and you want it to appear as if there's a lot of activity to attract new users. You'd buy a block of posts from this company who would send users like me to your site to fill your order. In turn, the company would pay me five cents a post, sending a paypal payment when you reached $20. You'd just link your username on a target forum, start a bunch of slapfights and make like $2 killing time on the computer between classes. I was doing it more for something to do than for the money as it only paid around a dollar an hour. After a month or so you could buy some random shit on ebay out of what they paid you.

Now that was before the Internet was highly commercialized and politicized and people where just looking for users for their little personal forums.

I'm pretty sure today they pay people to go to Reddit, 4Chan, Youtube or other social media sites and make posts promoting particular political ideas. So many of the people you'd get in slapfights with on Reddit or Youtube are probably just getting paid five or ten cents to post a counterpoint to your political argument in order to push certain ideas on behalf of a political think tank.

I'm also pretty sure a lot of articles on sites like Huffington Post, Ars Technica, videos on Youtube etc are paid for by either corporations who want to promote their products, think tanks who want to promote their political ideas or PR firms who want to promote specific people.

The mainstream internet has just become a series of people getting paid like a dollar an hour to gaslight you into buying into ideas, people and products.

Maybe bots have gotten more sophisticated and instead of paying Indians and students a dollar an hour, you just give these companies money and the set up a fleet of shill bots to push your shit, I don't know. I know I've run into my fair share of posters on site like Reddit who will repeat a talking point over and over in political discussions. They'll word it a little differently each time they reply to someone, but never reply to anyone who offers a counterpoint.
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How is that legal, i mean bumping websites okay. But after the cambrige analitica debacle these practices would be policed right?
 
It wouldn't surprise me at all if there were people out there who are getting paid to make posts on reddit/4chan etc. It wouldn't surprise me if they were getting paid to make fake accounts and pretend to be different people and post on various topics. I wouldn't even be surprised if they are getting paid to start fights or make posts on specific political topics.

I can't imagine that any of this is happening in large enough numbers to actually sway the general populace, but it definitely has the ability to influence a small group of people who are already predisposed to agree with one another.
I'm not saying this is happening a lot, or even at all, just pointing out that there's nothing stopping it. I don't know if it's happening a lot, but it could happen and it would be hard to prove if it did.

I do know that some news sites have been known to buy posts and comments from users on forums and sites like reddit. I also know that some of these comments and posts seem a little too perfect for them to come from people who just happened to be on the site at the right time and posted what was suggested.

I don't know how much of this is real and how much of this is just conspiracy theory bullshit, but I can definitely see how things like this could work in someone's favor.

This post brought to you by Facebook's GPT model after scraping the replies in this thread. I did not write this.
 
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I'm not sure exactly how to relate this to the topic, more that I'm curious what the purpose for these particular bots is. I was looking for background noise on Newpipe and saw these pop up in the suggestions. I'm sure there's probably several more, but these are the two I came across.



I do know that there are some channels on YouTube that upload nonstop to test site features like encoding, so it's possible it's something similar, but the content is what I find strange. It seems to be random recordings of radio broadcasts from all around the world, which isn't that off, but considering they're uploaded multiple times an hour and all have incomprehensible titles that would make archival a chore I don't see a purpose. If you're testing audio quality compression on the site end, why would you need more than one bot running to do it?
 
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Nick Gars said:
I'm not sure exactly how to relate this to the topic, more that I'm curious what the purpose for these particular bots is. I was looking for background noise on Newpipe and saw these pop up in the suggestions. I'm sure there's probably several more, but these are the two I came across.



I do know that there are some channels on YouTube that upload nonstop to test site features like encoding, so it's possible it's something similar, but the content is what I find strange. It seems to be random recordings of radio broadcasts from all around the world, which isn't that off, but considering they're uploaded multiple times an hour and all have incomprehensible titles that would make archival a chore I don't see a purpose. If you're testing audio quality compression on the site end, why would you need more than one bot running to do it?
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Weird channel. I found Null talking about God.

The thumbnails are different between each video so the archival information might be stored in there. It could be part of an upcoming ARG and they're flooding it with nonsense to obscure the relevant bits.
 
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