Massive networks of fake accounts found on Twitter

Re:Massive networks of fake accounts found on Twitter by rmetzler on Saturday January 28, 2017 @02:15AM (#13505335)

I want to mention Reddit bots who copy user content to make karma and gain influence on Reddit. There is one kind that mostly copies images with karma in the 1.000s and repost them with the same title a year or two later.

To appear more legit these bots also copy user comments and post them to /r/askreddit in threads that are similar named but most often not exactly the same as the original post. I suspect that often this /r/askreddit thread is also created by another bot from the same farm.

I'm not sure what the owners do with these bots, but I suspect you could downvote views you don't like or upvote videos to the frontpage and make lots of views and money from that.

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Re:Massive networks of fake accounts found on Twitter by TylerE on Saturday January 28, 2017 @03:29AM (#13505496)

Farm karma, then sell the accounts to political operatives, etc.

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Re:Massive networks of fake accounts found on Twitter by fnord123 on Saturday January 28, 2017 @03:20AM (#13505472)

And bots that take twitter videos and post a streamable mirror? It seems similar enough that it would be on topic.

How do they sit with you? As videos on twitter don't seem to work at all, it's a great service, imo.

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Re:Massive networks of fake accounts found on Twitter by rmetzler on Saturday January 28, 2017 @08:19AM (#13506123)

There are "I'm here to provide a service" bots which are almost always named appropriately. Like a reddit bot that links to IMDB or Wikipedia or converts between metric and imperial units.

The bots or sock puppets or fake accounts I mentioned don't provide any other value than copying old front-page material and repost it a year or 2 later without any indication that this isn't their own material.

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