Weird new kind of spam [09/19/2010]

[Many years ago Phooky had mentioned seeing an odd kind of behavior online. I can’t recall if this was a phenomena on Reddit, Facebook, or Twitter… but I think it may have been on Facebook. What he saw was some accounts going into an insular online group, starting an argument, and then taking those replies, sending them to the ideologically-opposite group, taking those replies and sending them to the first group, then lather, rinse, repeating. This was a very long time ago – perhaps in 2010 or 2011? In any case, at the time I assumed it was juvenile hijinks. With the benefit of hindsight, now I think it was something far more nefarious. I think it was likely the initial testing grounds for the influencing of online groups. This was around the time of the rise of the Tea Party Movement around 2009, then the Occupy Wallstret Movement in 2011. Maybe this is all just conspiracy mongering. Or, perhaps there were online experiments, sharpening the science of influencing online movements put into practice in 4Chan, QAnon, and other groups originating in online forums. Anyhow, my guess this weird spam was designed to pick a fight – either to mine the replies for data or get authorized to post comments for spam, or perhaps… all of the above.]

I noticed a few months ago a new kind of spam that sometimes wasn’t picked up by my spam filter. People (or their ‘bots) were leaving highly politically/religiously charged comments. The comments read as if they were written by real people – but they didn’t make much sense in the context of the post.

Drafts Zero - The Lost Blog Posts

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