Theory Confirmed: Social Media is Largely Faked

submitted by chottohen from winterwatch.net

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[–]magnora7 7 insightful - 3 fun7 insightful - 2 fun8 insightful - 3 fun -  (6 children)

Being admin, and seeing the number of obvious bots I've had to ban just running stupid scripts and making endless user names, for years now... makes me wonder how many bots are smart enough that I can't even tell they are bots.

It is still wild to me that there are just bots floating around the internet trying to register usernames and copy-paste scripts on multiple forums, like the "Americans" bot, which I've seen post on GLP as well as saidit for years now. They are like viruses, but they take over entire forums instead of your desktop computer.

[–]Chipit 6 insightful - 2 fun6 insightful - 1 fun7 insightful - 2 fun -  (1 child)

Haven't seen the Americans bot for a while. It seems to post once or twice a month at most. Swatting it down seems to keep it at bay. Speaking of which, it's back for its September appearance: https://saidit.net/user/Dmiv

[–]magnora7 3 insightful - 2 fun3 insightful - 1 fun4 insightful - 2 fun -  (0 children)

Thanks, banned him

[–]LarrySwinger2 4 insightful - 1 fun4 insightful - 0 fun5 insightful - 1 fun -  (3 children)

Another obvious example is /u/Airbus320, who hasn't made a single post that demonstrates intelligence, but only makes comments of a few words. Here's two examples of him randomly responding to my one year old comments: example 1 and example 2. This shows that he's scraping the forum, confirming his bot status. Why has he been allowed to roam free for almost two years?

(Also: I've made sure to mention him so that he will reply with a single emoticon, in case there's still any doubt.)

Are you going to add more admins soon? Can I be an admin? I spot bots all the time but my only power is to report and hope that an admin will see it and actually bother to instate a ban. My only intention is to remove spam.

(To further demonstrate my competence: /u/cuddles is another bot which is now dormant or banned, but which I spotted and reported within him within an hour of him making his first post, this is documented in the report to that post, I believe.)

[–]Airbus320 1 insightful - 2 fun1 insightful - 1 fun2 insightful - 2 fun -  (0 children)

😮