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Most viral things are driven, at least initially, by bots or click farms. Also, fake promotions from websites to artificially amplify posts or stories. View cou

Most viral things are driven, at least initially, by bots or click farms. Also, fake promotions from websites to artificially amplify posts or stories. View counts on a video or post can easily be manipulated.

sigmoid10 1y ago
You can buy server racks for under $200 from China that are made for holding like 20 Android motherboards. Get 50 of those and some centralised management software to interact with all of them on one big screen and you have potentially 1000 unique users that will be really hard to distinguish from bots using normal techniques. That's more than enough to jump-start a viral moment on many social media platforms. And if you hire 5 guys to post full time, you can completely steer the discussion on individual channels like facebook groups, instagram posts or reddit/HN threads.
- ants_everywhere 1y ago
  What I don't understand about bot farms is how they don't get IP banned. If you do buy such a rack, how do people in practice get a rack full of devices to look like they're coming from valid ips that aren't in a VPN or cloud provider's ip range?
  - simonw 1y ago
    Mobile phones end up sharing an external IP address with may other (real human) mobile phones on the same cellular network.
  - sigmoid10 1y ago
    IP banning is way more difficult in practice than most people realise due to NAT. How do you distinguish a bot farm that is heavily posting on some trendy topic from a school full of highly engaged kids? They'll both have a ton of traffic coming from a single IP as far as your server is concerned. And if any IP ever does get flagged (which only makes sense for static ones anyways), it is trivial to move to a new one.
  - sampullman 1y ago
    Residential proxies and other such techniques, I imagine.
  - marcusb 1y ago
    Most (all?) commercial social networks sell ads. Outrage-farm bots drive activity in two ways: the bot traffic itself and human response to the outrage bait. I think the sad truth is the bots are good for business.
- matwood 1y ago
  Yep. There was a paper a few years ago that looked at how Russian bots spread disinformation. Basically the bots hype the disinformation internally amongst themselves until it lands on a real persons feed. By that point it looks real because of all of the engagement. From there, real human emotion and the engagement algorithms take over.

sigmoid10 1y ago

You can buy server racks for under $200 from China that are made for holding like 20 Android motherboards. Get 50 of those and some centralised management software to interact with all of them on one big screen and you have potentially 1000 unique users that will be really hard to distinguish from bots using normal techniques. That's more than enough to jump-start a viral moment on many social media platforms. And if you hire 5 guys to post full time, you can completely steer the discussion on individual channels like facebook groups, instagram posts or reddit/HN threads.

ants_everywhere 1y ago
What I don't understand about bot farms is how they don't get IP banned. If you do buy such a rack, how do people in practice get a rack full of devices to look like they're coming from valid ips that aren't in a VPN or cloud provider's ip range?
- simonw 1y ago
  Mobile phones end up sharing an external IP address with may other (real human) mobile phones on the same cellular network.
- sigmoid10 1y ago
  IP banning is way more difficult in practice than most people realise due to NAT. How do you distinguish a bot farm that is heavily posting on some trendy topic from a school full of highly engaged kids? They'll both have a ton of traffic coming from a single IP as far as your server is concerned. And if any IP ever does get flagged (which only makes sense for static ones anyways), it is trivial to move to a new one.
- sampullman 1y ago
  Residential proxies and other such techniques, I imagine.
- marcusb 1y ago
  Most (all?) commercial social networks sell ads. Outrage-farm bots drive activity in two ways: the bot traffic itself and human response to the outrage bait. I think the sad truth is the bots are good for business.
matwood 1y ago
Yep. There was a paper a few years ago that looked at how Russian bots spread disinformation. Basically the bots hype the disinformation internally amongst themselves until it lands on a real persons feed. By that point it looks real because of all of the engagement. From there, real human emotion and the engagement algorithms take over.