>Unless we have those stories, then this pattern is plainly incompatible with actual humans submitting comments, even with the aid of some automation or pre-wri

>Unless we have those stories, then this pattern is plainly incompatible with actual humans submitting comments, even with the aid of some automation or pre-written letters. A site is set up to collect names for form letters. They don't submit it in real time; instead, they submit it in batches every few minutes. This is at least as plausible as the various explanations you gave above. In fact, if you read the linked blog post, they explain that this is how the API worked - you'd upload a CSV and everything would be uploaded in bulk. And the sizes still don't add up. As mentioned, a single campaign for the pro-NN side had 7 million suspicious comments. That's bigger than any of the alleged bot campaigns on the other side. Overall, there's more suspicious comments for the pro-NN side. Whether the evidence is enough to definitively call them bot campaigns or not, that's still true.