this post was submitted on 28 Feb 2025
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[–] merdaverse@lemmy.world 19 points 22 hours ago* (last edited 21 hours ago) (3 children)

Looking at their profiles, they don't look like bots to me. Maybe it's just that MAGAs sound as stupid as a bot swarm.

[–] CosmicCleric@lemmy.world 21 points 21 hours ago (2 children)

There's like a stupidly large amount of bots in YouTube comments.

Apparently they encourage engagement. 🤷

~This~ ~comment~ ~is~ ~licensed~ ~under~ ~CC~ ~BY-NC-SA~ ~4.0~

[–] merdaverse@lemmy.world 5 points 21 hours ago

True, the likes might be manufactured. Don't count on Google to moderate them

[–] Ledericas@lemm.ee 0 points 15 hours ago* (last edited 15 hours ago) (1 children)

yea i noticed that too on alot of scifi channels, especially star trek, doctor who videos. almost always around wokeness.

[–] CosmicCleric@lemmy.world 2 points 14 hours ago* (last edited 14 hours ago)

Actually regardless of any type of video subject, really.

Any new video that I've seen, across many different subjects, has robotic comments right away, when the videos are first uploaded, the first minute or three.

I guess the YouTube folks are thinking that if it looks like there's a bunch of people "in the room" other people will want to jump in and join the conversation.

Then after that, you'll get robotic responses to your comments, that are usually antagonistic in nature, to try to bring you back to the YouTube app to reply to and continue interacting with the app.

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[–] ubergeek@lemmy.today 11 points 21 hours ago (2 children)

AI has been rapidly employed to create social media profiles. And before AI, there are entire teams dedicated to managing their own "teams" of social media profiles.

You can rest assured, like 70% of "users" on social media sites are just puppet accounts. You, as a private citizen, can rent some of these pools for things like PR campaigns.

[–] Ledericas@lemm.ee 3 points 15 hours ago* (last edited 15 hours ago)

theres still teams doing that, in addition to the AI. Reddit is pretty wierd around ai, they use ai for thier moderation but will ban most AI used by users.(they wont do any thing around russia-troll AI accounts) but will happily ban others.

[–] brbposting@sh.itjust.works 2 points 19 hours ago

Join my new social network, SSNBook

Everyone is national-identity number verified through a third party overseen by PricewaterhouseCoopers, and we do regular video calls to vibe check you and try to sus out whether you’re posting your own thoughts or just renting out your account

Naturally only 40% of our “users” are bots

[ 👆 I think about this all time ] also for reviews etc.

[–] Zaktor@sopuli.xyz 3 points 20 hours ago (1 children)

How could you tell anything by their profiles? Most had no content or other information. It's not like Reddit where you can view their comments.

[–] merdaverse@lemmy.world 3 points 19 hours ago (1 children)

I checked the super generic comments that seemed AI generated. Some of them had content like videos or decent descriptions. Others had profiles that were as old as 10 years. If they were bots I would expect them to be created in the last few years. There's a few that are suspicious, but it was maybe 2 in 15 accounts. They could also be hacked accounts.

[–] Zaktor@sopuli.xyz 1 points 17 hours ago

I only saw one that had videos and one that had a playlist of some videos of a rightwing influencer. I wouldn't take account age to be a sign of not-bot, both because of compromised accounts as you mentioned and because YouTube botting has been going on for a long time now. It's 20 years old at this point and video monetization was introduced pretty soon after creation.

Here's their anti-bot policy page from 2014: https://web.archive.org/web/20140209083324/https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/3399767?hl=en