I've been back on Bluesky for a month, and I can barely tear myself away from the bot nonsense.
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The final new bot wave I've identified alarms me greatly because I'm not even sure it exists.
I've been "bot-hunting" for years - and I'm no longer sure I can spot them all now. The AI is getting really good.It takes high-level language skills to identify them, and the apps and the sites persist in throwing more tech at the problem.
They're mostly Reply-Guy chatbots at the moment.
The problem is exacerbated by users who keep engaging with these bots, significantly blurring the lines.
It's all shits and giggles now, but I suspect these will become very high calibre trollbots - and hellishly difficult to spot. They could overwhelm a smaller site rather quickly.
Their objective, like that of most bots, is fake traffic metrics. The platforms are lying to the influencers, and the advertisers, and the investors. They're all pretending to offer "eyeballs" (that's you and me) - and the new bots are passing the Turing test.
We all laughed at the Twitter egg-avi influx, and we're still paying the price.Clear your delusions: SkyNet is human and it's not sending the T-1000s back one at a time.
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What's troubling, too, is the "tech will save us" approach taken by the devs. Nothing in the history of social media suggests this is remotely true.
I follow most of the devs. They're really nice people and open to chatting with users.
But there's a lot of breathtaking techbro naivety in there. They really don't know how little they know about social media and how people behave.
Take, as an example, domain names. It's similar to creating your own instance, but Bluesky is far less a fediverse than you think. Bluesky, the company, controls a lot more than Mastodon does.
And they sell domain names. So I could switch to be @OutOntheMoors.satan.social as a joke (don't hate on them, they're fine), but there's a lot of ways I could get banned from the entire site without doing anything wrong. -
Equally troubling - and it goes from the CEO monarch butterfly to the lowliest Serie A funding investor - is all the money behind Bluesky is crypto.
If the cryptobots move in, I'm not sure they'll be shown the door. -
I'll end with my regular reminder: 90% of the bots are commercial, not political. At the moment, almost 100% of the Bluesky bots are "blue".
Most of the fake follower fodder - building up the lefty grifter accounts - are "blue dots in red states". This is exactly the same shit played on MAGA supporters previously on Twitter.
The bots are commercial, not political. -
The political bots are overwhelmingly scambots. There's no profit for them to be fash - most Bluesky users would block them on sight. So they pretend to be leftist, so their marks - that's you - feel a kinship and might "help out a friend".
The success rate is minuscule, but it's very, very cheap to run bots. -
@OutOnTheMoors Uh, I think I’m starting to see some of these on Mastodon. No avatar, no profile, created on 12/10 or a little after, and they basically leave a lot of angry left-ish comments all over the place.
I saw one talking shit about America and I was like “why would someone on Mastodon need a burner account for that?” but it being a trollbot testing the waters and building up a history makes sense.
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@MisuseCase On Bluesky, the Trust & Safety team is swamped with the influx of users, and they're really not paying attention to these ones. I think it'll come back to bite them.
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@OutOnTheMoors Well, on Mastodon a lot of these bots come up on Mastodon dot social - which is rather poorly moderated - and to a lesser extent on other instances where people can join and start posting without having admins approve them.
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The Nexus of Privacyreplied to Misuse Case last edited by
@MisuseCase interesting ... are you still seeing them?
also @OutOnTheMoors did you see this by Conspirador Norteño? https://conspirator0.substack.com/p/a-title-similar-to-the-curious-content
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Misuse Casereplied to The Nexus of Privacy last edited by
@thenexusofprivacy @OutOnTheMoors Haven’t seen any today although I did see a couple more conventional spam bots.
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The Nexus of Privacyreplied to Misuse Case last edited by
@MisuseCase thanks!
