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I've used and love Puppeteer, but it also makes me realize with enough money and the right skills, these tools are exactly what would be used to mass manipulate

I've used and love Puppeteer, but it also makes me realize with enough money and the right skills, these tools are exactly what would be used to mass manipulate social media. You could literally create thousands or millions of accounts and add enough entropy to make it undetectable. I've created a couple scripts to delete accounts, and even signing in can include randomization between scrolls and clicks to make each change entirely unique and to mimic real user interactions. Sort of scary to think about what is possible with this, especially given a large pool of residential IP addresses.

bryanrasmussen 6y ago
>with enough money and the right skills, these tools are exactly what would be used to mass manipulate social media. I believe with enough money and the right skills it has always been possible to manipulate the media - social or otherwise. The question is if puppeteer means we can decrease the amount of money significantly for a minor increase in the amount of skills.
- chromedev 6y ago
  Absolutely, there are already cheap third-party captcha solvers that basically outsource the captchas to real people. I could also see companies using this to inflate their user count.
tnolet 6y ago
OP here: funny and true story. We had a misconfiguration in our rate limiting. One smarty pants used it to blast his twitch channel with "viewers", e.g. a 1000 concurrent Puppeteer sessions. It was probably great for his engagement / viewership numbers till we shut him down.
- sovietmudkipz 6y ago
  I have to ask... What was the reason you shut this person down? Was it simply that they were violating your rate limit, or something more? E.g. if they were paying for the 1000 concurrent puppeteer sessions, would everything be in the clear with your SaaS? Presumably, your service doesn't care what the users use it for. Sure, though, it's a violation of twitch's terms of service to fake viewers on the platform. I may be naive -- could twitch sue a service that is used to fake viewers?
  - tnolet 6y ago
    They were violating our terms of service, rate limiting, responsible behaviour etc. etc. So we care quite a bit what Checkly is used for. We have a page for it: https://www.checklyhq.com/docs/browser-checks/responsible-use/ https://www.checklyhq.com/docs/browser-checks/responsible-us... Luckily, most users are completely ok. But fraud and abuse will always be a thing.
    - Dylanlacey 6y ago
      That you were asked this question makes me a little sad. Beside risks like Twitch (or worse, all of Amazon) blocking your traffic wholesale, letting someone use your product to abuse another is just a crappy thing to do; Especially if you let it because "well we're making money".
tester34 6y ago
You can always hire paid trolls which will be more effective, but also more expensive. Not even saying about smart paid trolls, who are good at using eristics.
- chromedev 6y ago
  I think a combination of social media manipulation and paid trolls basically describe the current political environment from my experience.
moooo99 6y ago
I crawled a few social media platforms that do not offer accessible APIs as an experiment. I mimicked user behavior, I even occasionally bypassed google's noChapta (although that could have been just pure luck) on a few sites. Seeing what people put in their bios, what their network looks like, their posts and all the metadata, its incredibly what amount of user data is pretty much out there in public. Seeing that this is just the tip of the iceberg in terms of what companies like Facebook are collecting, all those stories about algorithms predicting pregnancies before the people themselves know about it seem much more realistic. The main think holding people back from mass creating accounts to spam social media (even more) are chaptas, and those can be outsourced to chapta farms somewhere in the world.

bryanrasmussen 6y ago

>with enough money and the right skills, these tools are exactly what would be used to mass manipulate social media. I believe with enough money and the right skills it has always been possible to manipulate the media - social or otherwise. The question is if puppeteer means we can decrease the amount of money significantly for a minor increase in the amount of skills.

chromedev 6y ago
Absolutely, there are already cheap third-party captcha solvers that basically outsource the captchas to real people. I could also see companies using this to inflate their user count.

tnolet 6y ago

OP here: funny and true story. We had a misconfiguration in our rate limiting. One smarty pants used it to blast his twitch channel with "viewers", e.g. a 1000 concurrent Puppeteer sessions. It was probably great for his engagement / viewership numbers till we shut him down.

sovietmudkipz 6y ago
I have to ask... What was the reason you shut this person down? Was it simply that they were violating your rate limit, or something more? E.g. if they were paying for the 1000 concurrent puppeteer sessions, would everything be in the clear with your SaaS? Presumably, your service doesn't care what the users use it for. Sure, though, it's a violation of twitch's terms of service to fake viewers on the platform. I may be naive -- could twitch sue a service that is used to fake viewers?
- tnolet 6y ago
  They were violating our terms of service, rate limiting, responsible behaviour etc. etc. So we care quite a bit what Checkly is used for. We have a page for it: https://www.checklyhq.com/docs/browser-checks/responsible-use/ https://www.checklyhq.com/docs/browser-checks/responsible-us... Luckily, most users are completely ok. But fraud and abuse will always be a thing.
  - Dylanlacey 6y ago
    That you were asked this question makes me a little sad. Beside risks like Twitch (or worse, all of Amazon) blocking your traffic wholesale, letting someone use your product to abuse another is just a crappy thing to do; Especially if you let it because "well we're making money".

tester34 6y ago

You can always hire paid trolls which will be more effective, but also more expensive. Not even saying about smart paid trolls, who are good at using eristics.

chromedev 6y ago
I think a combination of social media manipulation and paid trolls basically describe the current political environment from my experience.

moooo99 6y ago

I crawled a few social media platforms that do not offer accessible APIs as an experiment. I mimicked user behavior, I even occasionally bypassed google's noChapta (although that could have been just pure luck) on a few sites. Seeing what people put in their bios, what their network looks like, their posts and all the metadata, its incredibly what amount of user data is pretty much out there in public. Seeing that this is just the tip of the iceberg in terms of what companies like Facebook are collecting, all those stories about algorithms predicting pregnancies before the people themselves know about it seem much more realistic. The main think holding people back from mass creating accounts to spam social media (even more) are chaptas, and those can be outsourced to chapta farms somewhere in the world.