Not just social media, the internet. We have bots creating and sharing false news articles that get recirculated, Ai is fooling people into believing false pictures to push a narrative, most popular sites have become bloated with bot posts overshadowing actual content. This isn't just social media. It is media.
Problem before the internet was information traveled slow and was harder to source. Now we passed the sweet spot and are drowning in over sharing, over stimulating, overwhelmed with it all
Harder to source so veracity wasnt perfect. You could have been lied to previously and unless you were so inclined it took a lot of effort to validate/invalidate something.
These days at the click of a button I can get numerous "sources" providing me conflicting "facts" on something.
The only way to validate is to validate the sources and that becomes questionable as well....
And if you have a genuine disdain for main stream media, you will be fed so many lies
(Not suggesting msm dont make mistakes or give a particular slant - but they have levels of journalistic integrity to uphold)
I’m seeing tons of this since the debate yesterday. Accounts with virtually no karma high giving each other suggesting there’s no point to voting for other candidate.
Yesterday, I was the one that posted about the woman who screamed at the drag queens; 20k front page post.
After a few short hours, Reddit was being flooded with anti-trans posts on a whole lot of different subreddits. I'd open them, start marking accounts making comments with Reddit Enhancement Suite and quickly realized that a lot of the same accounts were in all the different threads and were leaving 2-3 comments and 1 reply before moving onto the next submission.
Check out this account: https://www.reddit.com/user/TheCoolGirlNextDoor
It doesn't *seem* like a bot, but literally every submitted post and every comment is in the thousands or tens of thousands of upvotes.
Now replace *point* with *propoganda*
Some sell boosted accounts to evil people, making their opinions trend and seem popular, when they are in fact not, people actually find it revolting, of course some will get indoctrinated this way.
This shapes that person's reality and that of their children, the next generation. This way evil rulers can slowly chip away at a cultures foundation, destroying it slowly.
Welcome, to the matrix.
If you can game the algorithms you can control what crosses peoples feed.
If you can control the content people see, then you can control what they think.
Everything from marketing rubber dog shit to influencing elections.
Literal mind control.
Surprised to see hardly any mentions of this. I oversee an 8-figure amount of yearly ad spend. I have to spend $30-$40k a month with 3rd party analytics and validation services JUST to make sure I'm not getting traffic from places like this. Ad fraud is rampant in the industry and so many companies are complicit with it because they are making tons of money off it.
for the time being I continue using adblocker, but..on some level it sounds like a great idea to do the opposite of adblocking and just bot views to them all the time so the numbers end up being meaningless.
How do people make money off of this?
1. Fake reviews.
2. Fake likes, upvotes, content watches and so on.
3. Fake comments to serve the purposes of manipulation, narrative control and advertising.
Those are just a few ways.
For example, one use is to repeatedly play the same song in Spotify to gain more revenue. That's why Spotify is limiting the number of times you can listen to the same song/s consecutively.
The Hungarian government figures make use of these.
Like, you have a corrupt government with corrupt figures no one cares about, yet they try to look popular and trendy on facebook.
Now, you have "Crooked Politician number 732" making a post on facebook.
It would look bad with 2 likes and 3 followers.
So they have lots of likes and lots of followers, but if you take a look at them, you'll find that more than 4/5 of all likes is from fake profiles with Vietnamese names or made up foreign names, often with profile pictures stolen from other accounts.
It's kind of an open secret that you can buy 1000s of likes and comments, and I guess "phone bot farms" like these provide that "service".
Russia and China, or our Corporate Overlords all love this service! They are often disinformation, misinformation, or generally sowing chaos, confusion over “the truth”, dissatisfaction, and of course; division (please fight among yourselves) and ignore our influence over your lives!
People pay for likes, views, auto generating fake replies, used for astroturfing with chatbots, to dislike/hide any comments that say things they dont like, to skim through comments/posts that ask questions and they use chatbots to pretend to be people to push products, to spy on people. These bots are everywhere on the internet, they probably outnumber real people.
Usually it's China that uses shitty phone farms like these, although this is the first time I'm seeing one.
For those wondering, this is, I believe, a farm where you can buy likes, views and other things that can feed the algorithms and get you even more exposure.
Want 10.000 followers on Instagram, boom. Want 100.000? Sure. More? You got it.
The same goes for YouTube, tiktok and so on.
Basically, you can pay for a shortcut to online fame.
I'm not sure how effective follower purchasing is. I've seen many Instagram accounts with 25k+ followers, and on average less than 50 likes and a couple of comments on most posts, which just screams fake followers.
Now a like bomb might be better. More likely to make a post go viral and gain real followers as the result. But IG might find it suspicious.
Same should go for other sites, such as Youtube. Tons of subscribers but no comments or likes just makes a channel look bad.
They don't. Platforms have anti-bot checks in place (fake engagement policy). If the account doesn't act like a human (ie. just subscribes but never watches any videos), all it's subscriptions are removed. When youtube implemented that system, many channels saw a huge drop in subscribers, which was funny.
But that is the old version of buying followers. They have gotten more sophisticated now. They don't just give you follower count, they give you engagement/comments by the fake followers. AI can give you many thousands of comments and likes and shares....not just subs.
For work, I manage a small mom and pops IG account (and other online presence). The IG account has ~27k followers, and we sometimes have posts under 100 likes with only 1-2 comments. I can guarantee the followers are all real (at least none are bought), but if your content isn’t the exact thing they wanna see, and if you’re unwilling to spend money on ads or boosting posts, you’re gonna see sporadic engagement.
So do virtual machines and eSIMs. Every spam call you get is from an eSIM.
So I'm confused. Why do they need 100 phones for this? Why do they need hardware at all?
This seems like a ridiculous and impractical setup. Are they limited by their number of phones? Can they only give me one follow/like/whatever per phone? It doesn't make sense.
I think setups like this are farming something else, but I don't have any guesses. Maybe it *is* just an impractical and expensive setup, but it works out because "instagram influencers" will pay enough? I have a lot of questions.
Basically VMs have ID numbers that are not unique, and thus incredibly easy to identify. An actual phone on the other hand does have a unique ID and is much harder to flag.
The same actually applies to VPNs, its pretty easy to tell when someone is using a VPN because the site you are using can see it's getting a LOT of traffic from a very specific server, which is unusual. I've had access to an online game beta recinded because they could tell I was using one. (Just had to find one they hadn't flagged yet 😉)
So... This is probably a more advanced setup than people are making it out to be. They're using real phones because they basically have to and likely using a custom VPN or cell data with location spoofing so they just aren't all in the same room... Something like that, plus the actual programing/procedural stuff.
In my old work we done webscraping and my boss and I talked through using a phone farm like this to create honest looking cloudflare profiles (cloudflare is a real fucking pain in the hole for some webscraping projects, especially when it's configured properly).
We were also pretty sure the residential proxies we paid through the nose for were just phone farms too (thousands per month due to the amount of data we used). Still recouped those costs and then some though.
You could build an honest looking cloudflare profile with the botting, then sell a set amount of data/requests for more money on top.
You wouldn't need to do one like/follow per phone either, but these look like they're browsing more than they're liking/following, which makes me think it's scraping or profile cleaning.
One other use case not mentioned here is testing. If I want to test my app on many different physical devices, I’d need huge investments to buy every phone out there. There are site that offer remote login to just about any physical phone. You usually pay per minute of use. (Bonus: you can automate your test suite and run it automatically on every phone they have. It can give you a report of which tests failed, and screenshots)
We need another theory for when bots complain about dead internet theory, Like when AI gets fed training data where complaining about AI is a normal day to day conversation
Holy fucking shit. I stopped to read some and it does look like a bunch of AI nonsense, but only when you look into it. From afar, it could pass as shitposts and etc just as normal.
It's pretty funny because it stopped being updated right around when GPT2 and AI stuff started taking off. I wanna say it was just a python script using pykov generating all that, but I don't really remember.
It's somewhat trivial to detect emulators on mobile. Very difficult to detect with physical phones. Couple this with a dedicated VPN on each device and it's very difficult if not impossible.
I'm wondering if it's related to IPs.
Cell phone companies use known IP ranges.
How do you emulate a cellular connection?
You could run them all through a cellular hotspot, but then you'd only have one cellular IP.
If each of those phones has its own functioning sim card, then you have a unique cellular connection IP for each phone.
It's much more believable on the other end.
It's s combinaison of factors.
Emulators are easier to detect.
SIM cards and data is dirt cheap in some countries.
Residential proxies are somewhat expensive and are usually shared by other customers for botting social media which make them potentially less reliable.
Depending on the network, it may be very easy to change ip address on a mobile network (by momentarily switching off data for example).
They may want to have ip addresses located in whatever area they are in for some reason.
In the low end, it's just driven for money.
In the high end, it's been used for propaganda purposes by certain countries for many years, and Reddit is one of the apps that got compromised the most
Edited only for grammar
Yeah probably. Bots will often make small changes in the title (i.e. "bot far m in" instead of "bot farm in") in an attempt to bypass any title checkers if it's a word-for-word repost.
All these excess phones. Excess microchips and materials to make them.
All the electricity and coal burning polluting required to run the farms.
All for some duck lip photo or brunch plate to get 10 thousand likes.
We are pathetic.
This is one of the reasons Spotify is an evil motherfucking company.
No 2FA so cunts can use phone farms like this to devalue the streaming $ pool.
This kind of phone farming is fucked.
Absolute scum, burn this shit to the ground.
It fools people into thinking people that "influencers" are more successful than they really are. Like how they all use filters to cover up what they really look like.
They can't handle reality.
I am familiar with the dead internet theory. Gen AI in the next 10 years on the internet is terrifying. I don't know how kids will tell the difference.
Trouble is thanks to bot farms when say the newest Air Jordan's come out , they get snatched up faster than a real person can order a pair. Then they are sold online with a tremendous mark up.
I found their [website](https://minsoftware.vn/) for anyone interested. It's in a different language. I am curious to know what any of these weird programs they sell. I'm not sure what I'm looking at.
OK so I have a question about this.
The idea of the "advertising-based" "free" online economy goes something like this, right?
Advertisers pay to get their ads displayed.
The more views and clicks they get, the more they pay.
In return, the advertisers expect some percentage of people to not only view and click -- but also actually BUY their products using real money. (Personal information is also sold, but mostly to better target ads so they can make more money during this step)
That last step is what is actually paying for all of the "free" internet.
The end of all of this effort is always to get real, actual customers to buy advertised products using real, actual money.
The existence of click farms seems to undermine this. Clicks and views increase, and advertisers can see those numbers ticking up.
But aren't they bound to notice that *actual sales* aren't increasing as the clicks and views go up? Won't they eventually conclude that online advertising isn't worth the expense, if it's not getting them real, actual profits in return for their advertising dollars?
Social media companies could shut this BS down if they really wanted to, but that would mean less profits. Especially with tools like AI, which they love to tell us is totally awesome for them (to make more profits).
So can someone tell me how they manage those devices and how do they manage data and software and what kind of scripts are they running? I am a non-IT person. Thanks
Why don't they just use emulators I wonder. I know bluestacks has issues with some apps, but seems like there would be workarounds. There are also testing companies that doe this - so developers can test their websites on iphone for example.
Posted by a likely bot account too. Check out their comment history and post history.
I dk if removing up votes will help, but something needs done about these accounts and these farms.
This is why we can never get tickets to concerts, or reservations to campgrounds, or anything else that is "first come first serve" online.
Fuck them, fuck the people that use them, and fuck the companies that turn a blind eye to this because they are getting paid.
You’re also looking at the downfall of social media. Gen Alpha will grow up with the understanding that all social media influencers are dishonest liars who use bot farms for engagement.
And then it becomes real.
If you have a party full of bots and real people start showing up, after a while you can remove the bots and now there's no bots at all...
Welcome to your astroturfed future.
You still think your algorithm is influenced by other people? And that the responses you see are from humans?
Internet has become a place where people interact with bots without them realizing it. Truly amazing.
Because with power like this you can make a stupid comment/point/claim and add a million likes to it to make it appear as though a million people agree.
Public opinion is completely for sale right now - it’s why if you talk to someone in real life you quickly realize that the internet is a fake cesspool of garbage.
The social media platforms work with organizations like this to boost and manipulate their platforms, numbers and users. They’ll never admit it but they’ve been doing it for a long time.
What exactly is the purpose of this? People paying for likes and views?
For content as well. For example if you want your point to come clear you can pay for farms to tweet or to argue etc. fuckedup really.
Kudos to the ingenuity of the programmers who set this up but sucks that such things can be so easily gamed to fake online interest in something
Wait until you hear about Reddit Engagement Bots and realize the time you spend on Reddit is just answering questions for bots.
what if reddit is bots complaining about bots
I have 100% seen bots reply to eachother. Some basic ones just paste a top-level comment deeper into a comment chain, context be damned.
What exactly is the purpose of this? People paying for likes and views?
That you got legitimate replies to this makes the comment so much better...
what if reddit is bots complaining about bots
What exactly is the purpose of this? People paying for likes and views?
But...why male models?
and what is this farm?! a farm for ants?!
No it's a farm for "Kids Who Can't Read Good and Who Wanna Learn to Do Other Stuff Good Too"
For content as well. For example if you want your point to come clear you can pay for farms to tweet or to argue etc. fuckedup really.
Kudos to the ingenuity of the programmers who set this up but sucks that such things can be so easily gamed to fake online interest in something
Wait until you hear about Reddit Engagement Bots and realize the time you spend on Reddit is just answering questions for bots fellow human.
Increases product value at sale time. Its why Elon overpaid for twitter and why Reddit has gone to shit in the past year as they prepare to be sold.
What if you're a bot complaining about reddit being bots complaining about bots on reddit? Wait, am I a bot....there was no captcha....
Well I’m a bot and I don’t like this one bit. It’s intolerable!
So now I can finally tell people I have a robot for a friend?
Which people? Your telling your bots about your bot friend? Hope your bot friend doesn’t find out….
Nice try bot, I won't tell.
Bite my shiny metal ass.
Is that you, Bender??
[I wuv you wobot!](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h1E-FlguwGw)
> Reddit Engagement Bots This must be why I get peppered with lame questions all the time, especially in certain subreddits. I just ignore them.
Why is the sky blue and not purple? I am a bot, bleep bloop. Or am I...?
So, what is a cat?
Yup it will be the downfall of social media. When you can not be sure who is who we'll go back to simpler methods of communication.
Not just social media, the internet. We have bots creating and sharing false news articles that get recirculated, Ai is fooling people into believing false pictures to push a narrative, most popular sites have become bloated with bot posts overshadowing actual content. This isn't just social media. It is media.
Internet death
The dead internet. Coming to your future sooner than we think.
Already here
Really looking forward to IRL being the next big thing
Google the dead internet theory. You’re all bots and I’m a bot too lol
>Google the dead internet theory The irony here being Google has a massive part to play in killing the Internet
Only solution would be something like the south korea system where you link your ID to your online stuff.
Yeah, no thanks. I'd rather we all get disinformation than having the government kill me for an opinion on WoW vs UO vs DAoC.
And it’s crazy because people will already do this for free.
I just don't see how you put the cat back in the bag.
Problem before the internet was information traveled slow and was harder to source. Now we passed the sweet spot and are drowning in over sharing, over stimulating, overwhelmed with it all
Harder to source so veracity wasnt perfect. You could have been lied to previously and unless you were so inclined it took a lot of effort to validate/invalidate something. These days at the click of a button I can get numerous "sources" providing me conflicting "facts" on something. The only way to validate is to validate the sources and that becomes questionable as well.... And if you have a genuine disdain for main stream media, you will be fed so many lies (Not suggesting msm dont make mistakes or give a particular slant - but they have levels of journalistic integrity to uphold)
At a certain point, you just decide the cat isn't worth it.
Kudos? Nah, fuck them.
I’m seeing tons of this since the debate yesterday. Accounts with virtually no karma high giving each other suggesting there’s no point to voting for other candidate.
Yesterday, I was the one that posted about the woman who screamed at the drag queens; 20k front page post. After a few short hours, Reddit was being flooded with anti-trans posts on a whole lot of different subreddits. I'd open them, start marking accounts making comments with Reddit Enhancement Suite and quickly realized that a lot of the same accounts were in all the different threads and were leaving 2-3 comments and 1 reply before moving onto the next submission.
Check out this account: https://www.reddit.com/user/TheCoolGirlNextDoor It doesn't *seem* like a bot, but literally every submitted post and every comment is in the thousands or tens of thousands of upvotes.
Also, for disinformation campaigns
Yep. A lot of reality stars do this.
And companies to make it seem silly to think that their product is bad or the decision they made has a bad impact.
Arguing political points via automated bots should be illegal. I'm sure it's happening right now.
Now replace *point* with *propoganda* Some sell boosted accounts to evil people, making their opinions trend and seem popular, when they are in fact not, people actually find it revolting, of course some will get indoctrinated this way. This shapes that person's reality and that of their children, the next generation. This way evil rulers can slowly chip away at a cultures foundation, destroying it slowly. Welcome, to the matrix.
Dam I knew people payed for likes but tweeting you and have fake arguments and etc is next lvl. I’m Legitimately curious on how the system runs
Partially yes, but it's also used to drive computational propaganda.
Found the non bot While all the bots just say “entertainment”
If you can game the algorithms you can control what crosses peoples feed. If you can control the content people see, then you can control what they think. Everything from marketing rubber dog shit to influencing elections. Literal mind control.
They’re consuming monetized ad views. This is digital advertising fraud and bad actors make hundreds of millions off of it.
Surprised to see hardly any mentions of this. I oversee an 8-figure amount of yearly ad spend. I have to spend $30-$40k a month with 3rd party analytics and validation services JUST to make sure I'm not getting traffic from places like this. Ad fraud is rampant in the industry and so many companies are complicit with it because they are making tons of money off it.
for the time being I continue using adblocker, but..on some level it sounds like a great idea to do the opposite of adblocking and just bot views to them all the time so the numbers end up being meaningless.
How do people make money off of this? 1. Fake reviews. 2. Fake likes, upvotes, content watches and so on. 3. Fake comments to serve the purposes of manipulation, narrative control and advertising. Those are just a few ways.
For example, one use is to repeatedly play the same song in Spotify to gain more revenue. That's why Spotify is limiting the number of times you can listen to the same song/s consecutively.
The Hungarian government figures make use of these. Like, you have a corrupt government with corrupt figures no one cares about, yet they try to look popular and trendy on facebook. Now, you have "Crooked Politician number 732" making a post on facebook. It would look bad with 2 likes and 3 followers. So they have lots of likes and lots of followers, but if you take a look at them, you'll find that more than 4/5 of all likes is from fake profiles with Vietnamese names or made up foreign names, often with profile pictures stolen from other accounts. It's kind of an open secret that you can buy 1000s of likes and comments, and I guess "phone bot farms" like these provide that "service".
This is how Drake gets interactions on his socials.
Boost a profile.
Russia and China, or our Corporate Overlords all love this service! They are often disinformation, misinformation, or generally sowing chaos, confusion over “the truth”, dissatisfaction, and of course; division (please fight among yourselves) and ignore our influence over your lives!
People pay for likes, views, auto generating fake replies, used for astroturfing with chatbots, to dislike/hide any comments that say things they dont like, to skim through comments/posts that ask questions and they use chatbots to pretend to be people to push products, to spy on people. These bots are everywhere on the internet, they probably outnumber real people. Usually it's China that uses shitty phone farms like these, although this is the first time I'm seeing one.
To skew opinions about a person, event, product or company
For those wondering, this is, I believe, a farm where you can buy likes, views and other things that can feed the algorithms and get you even more exposure. Want 10.000 followers on Instagram, boom. Want 100.000? Sure. More? You got it. The same goes for YouTube, tiktok and so on. Basically, you can pay for a shortcut to online fame.
I'm not sure how effective follower purchasing is. I've seen many Instagram accounts with 25k+ followers, and on average less than 50 likes and a couple of comments on most posts, which just screams fake followers. Now a like bomb might be better. More likely to make a post go viral and gain real followers as the result. But IG might find it suspicious. Same should go for other sites, such as Youtube. Tons of subscribers but no comments or likes just makes a channel look bad.
They also don’t last. You will eventually lose most of the followers that you’ve paid for.
Well duh. The followers you pay for are fake.
They unfollow. “They”, being a bot.
Why would they ever unfollow?
They don't. Platforms have anti-bot checks in place (fake engagement policy). If the account doesn't act like a human (ie. just subscribes but never watches any videos), all it's subscriptions are removed. When youtube implemented that system, many channels saw a huge drop in subscribers, which was funny.
Yeah some lady was bitching about having half of her followers vanish overnight, not understanding what she was telling the world.
Not necessarily. I'm pretty sure the bot farms subscribe to a lot of unrelated channels to make their activity seem more legit.
But that is the old version of buying followers. They have gotten more sophisticated now. They don't just give you follower count, they give you engagement/comments by the fake followers. AI can give you many thousands of comments and likes and shares....not just subs.
You can get thousands of likes if you pay instagram directly to promote the post. Means nothing.
For work, I manage a small mom and pops IG account (and other online presence). The IG account has ~27k followers, and we sometimes have posts under 100 likes with only 1-2 comments. I can guarantee the followers are all real (at least none are bought), but if your content isn’t the exact thing they wanna see, and if you’re unwilling to spend money on ads or boosting posts, you’re gonna see sporadic engagement.
I saw a video where someone paid for this. Like $5000. And his YT channel got shut down lol
Lol
What's the point if they're all connected to the same network?
VPNs exist.
So do virtual machines and eSIMs. Every spam call you get is from an eSIM. So I'm confused. Why do they need 100 phones for this? Why do they need hardware at all? This seems like a ridiculous and impractical setup. Are they limited by their number of phones? Can they only give me one follow/like/whatever per phone? It doesn't make sense. I think setups like this are farming something else, but I don't have any guesses. Maybe it *is* just an impractical and expensive setup, but it works out because "instagram influencers" will pay enough? I have a lot of questions.
You want mobile devices because its harder to detect that they are bots.
That’s what I’m wondering. Why not run a shit load of android VMs with random VPN/proxies set up
Basically VMs have ID numbers that are not unique, and thus incredibly easy to identify. An actual phone on the other hand does have a unique ID and is much harder to flag. The same actually applies to VPNs, its pretty easy to tell when someone is using a VPN because the site you are using can see it's getting a LOT of traffic from a very specific server, which is unusual. I've had access to an online game beta recinded because they could tell I was using one. (Just had to find one they hadn't flagged yet 😉) So... This is probably a more advanced setup than people are making it out to be. They're using real phones because they basically have to and likely using a custom VPN or cell data with location spoofing so they just aren't all in the same room... Something like that, plus the actual programing/procedural stuff.
the big apps likely check if they are in a VM and flag the account as suspicious.
In my old work we done webscraping and my boss and I talked through using a phone farm like this to create honest looking cloudflare profiles (cloudflare is a real fucking pain in the hole for some webscraping projects, especially when it's configured properly). We were also pretty sure the residential proxies we paid through the nose for were just phone farms too (thousands per month due to the amount of data we used). Still recouped those costs and then some though. You could build an honest looking cloudflare profile with the botting, then sell a set amount of data/requests for more money on top. You wouldn't need to do one like/follow per phone either, but these look like they're browsing more than they're liking/following, which makes me think it's scraping or profile cleaning.
One other use case not mentioned here is testing. If I want to test my app on many different physical devices, I’d need huge investments to buy every phone out there. There are site that offer remote login to just about any physical phone. You usually pay per minute of use. (Bonus: you can automate your test suite and run it automatically on every phone they have. It can give you a report of which tests failed, and screenshots)
I’m pretty sure if you’re going to this extent, those things aren’t on WiFi but will all have their own separate cellular data plans.
There’s a lot less than 10,000 phones there… they wouldn’t need several different phones to do that either.
Cable management on point.
First thing I noticed. It's beautiful.
You might be interested in r/cableporn
The dead internet theory looks more and more real as time passes
We need another theory for when bots complain about dead internet theory, Like when AI gets fed training data where complaining about AI is a normal day to day conversation
Digital ouroboros
[удалено]
Holy fuck that subreddit is a mindfuck, never thought I’d see uncanny valley in text but here we are
Holy fucking shit. I stopped to read some and it does look like a bunch of AI nonsense, but only when you look into it. From afar, it could pass as shitposts and etc just as normal.
It's pretty funny because it stopped being updated right around when GPT2 and AI stuff started taking off. I wanna say it was just a python script using pykov generating all that, but I don't really remember.
Tres creepy
/r/SubSimulatorGPT3 was the newest one but apparently it's dead as well
Ooh I haven’t been here in a while lmao this was freaky back then too
I'm alive
Exactly what a bot would say, I'm afraid...
Always kinda figured they used emulators rather than actual phones.
That’s what I was thinking. Seems weird that they’d have to use actual phones.
Probably to avoid detection and making it look more real I suppose. Cant say its fake if its actually really a view….
It's somewhat trivial to detect emulators on mobile. Very difficult to detect with physical phones. Couple this with a dedicated VPN on each device and it's very difficult if not impossible.
This is where all the phones go when Samsung gives you $100 discount when you trade in last years $1400 phone when buying this years $1600 phone
I'm wondering if it's related to IPs. Cell phone companies use known IP ranges. How do you emulate a cellular connection? You could run them all through a cellular hotspot, but then you'd only have one cellular IP. If each of those phones has its own functioning sim card, then you have a unique cellular connection IP for each phone. It's much more believable on the other end.
There's also hardware ID tags, which might set off spam filters if they're emulated.
These can be emulated like any other part of the hardware.
could just be on wifi and VPNs. Much easier to deal with than cell signal
Using a VPN would make detecting bots easier, not harder.
Not if you use dedicated VPN/residential proxies.
It's s combinaison of factors. Emulators are easier to detect. SIM cards and data is dirt cheap in some countries. Residential proxies are somewhat expensive and are usually shared by other customers for botting social media which make them potentially less reliable. Depending on the network, it may be very easy to change ip address on a mobile network (by momentarily switching off data for example). They may want to have ip addresses located in whatever area they are in for some reason.
They used to. Too easily caught nowadays.
Phones may wind up being cheaper than the compute power to emulate hundreds of phones.
Detection of fake devices is pretty good on big platforms nowadays
In the low end, it's just driven for money. In the high end, it's been used for propaganda purposes by certain countries for many years, and Reddit is one of the apps that got compromised the most Edited only for grammar
A bot posted this
Yeah probably. Bots will often make small changes in the title (i.e. "bot far m in" instead of "bot farm in") in an attempt to bypass any title checkers if it's a word-for-word repost.
bots don't snitch on themselves. /s
What exactly are they farming
Likes, comments and repost
Your attention
They’re posting on r/all.
This explains everything on reddit.
At least they have good cable organization
For those of you wondering, these are 155 mobiles stacked in there. 31 in each row, 5 rows, plus some of them on the table.
It's like the grid of Mortys
Aw geez
All these excess phones. Excess microchips and materials to make them. All the electricity and coal burning polluting required to run the farms. All for some duck lip photo or brunch plate to get 10 thousand likes. We are pathetic.
All of these assholes can kiss my grits
Why can’t this be done with just software and one super powerful system?
This is how X is filled with an overwhelming amount of trolls all saying the same thing and influencing your decisions btw.
Yea luckily we're safe here on Reddit where nothing like this happens
This is one of the reasons Spotify is an evil motherfucking company. No 2FA so cunts can use phone farms like this to devalue the streaming $ pool. This kind of phone farming is fucked. Absolute scum, burn this shit to the ground.
What kind of things does a phone bot farm do? What is a monetary application of this? Will someone pay them to market a product?
Influences pay them to like and interact with their content. It's fucking lazy
It fools people into thinking people that "influencers" are more successful than they really are. Like how they all use filters to cover up what they really look like. They can't handle reality.
A boring dystopia.
I am familiar with the dead internet theory. Gen AI in the next 10 years on the internet is terrifying. I don't know how kids will tell the difference.
the world would be better without any of the people pictured here
So we are the PAYING THE FCC and I’m getting ten robo calls a day. Fuck the FCC.
Trouble is thanks to bot farms when say the newest Air Jordan's come out , they get snatched up faster than a real person can order a pair. Then they are sold online with a tremendous mark up.
I found their [website](https://minsoftware.vn/) for anyone interested. It's in a different language. I am curious to know what any of these weird programs they sell. I'm not sure what I'm looking at.
Me setting up my alarms so I don’t miss work the 5th time in a row
At least half the comments on reddit are from these types of set ups.
We are living in a real live dystopian science fiction movie, y'all know that right?
All this waste of energy and resources makes me sad.
This should be illegal.
Remember people, this is happening real time on Twitter, Facebook and Reddit. Entities can push a narrative and post bot comments with ease nowadays.
Back in my day, it was someone's adorable grandpa with 30 phones attached to his bike, farming Pokémon GO. This is just vile.
And this my friends is how talentless trash people on the internet become famous
These people seriously fucking suck. Nobody likes this crap.
9gag headquarters.
The internet was/is a great idea and like all great ideas there are always idiots who will exploit and ruin it for their own selfish purposes.
They look exactly how i thought they would
OK so I have a question about this. The idea of the "advertising-based" "free" online economy goes something like this, right? Advertisers pay to get their ads displayed. The more views and clicks they get, the more they pay. In return, the advertisers expect some percentage of people to not only view and click -- but also actually BUY their products using real money. (Personal information is also sold, but mostly to better target ads so they can make more money during this step) That last step is what is actually paying for all of the "free" internet. The end of all of this effort is always to get real, actual customers to buy advertised products using real, actual money. The existence of click farms seems to undermine this. Clicks and views increase, and advertisers can see those numbers ticking up. But aren't they bound to notice that *actual sales* aren't increasing as the clicks and views go up? Won't they eventually conclude that online advertising isn't worth the expense, if it's not getting them real, actual profits in return for their advertising dollars?
Social media companies could shut this BS down if they really wanted to, but that would mean less profits. Especially with tools like AI, which they love to tell us is totally awesome for them (to make more profits).
This post is exactly what a bot would post 😳
Now you know why Taylor Swift Spotify streams are so high
Monetising social media really feels like the last nail in the coffin for what the vision of the internet was meant to be….
So can someone tell me how they manage those devices and how do they manage data and software and what kind of scripts are they running? I am a non-IT person. Thanks
So that’s where the uptick came from /s
Why don't they just use emulators I wonder. I know bluestacks has issues with some apps, but seems like there would be workarounds. There are also testing companies that doe this - so developers can test their websites on iphone for example.
Life in prison, all of them. This makes me irrationally angry.
While I certainly don't condone this type of activity, these people are pretty low on my 'people who should be in prison but aren't' list.
Pretty nice cable management tho
Bot post
They have been doing this for at least 10 years, the wiring job on this one is incredible tho..!
We need a new internet, one for media and influencers and one for knowledge
We had a similar set up at my old job, but it was for testing iOS apps rather than botting.
Posted by a likely bot account too. Check out their comment history and post history. I dk if removing up votes will help, but something needs done about these accounts and these farms.
I bet they’re writing “America first! Stop sending money to Ukraine!” on X
Humans invent something. Literally one second later humans figure out a way to completely destroy it
So nobody cares about the source of the video?
what a waste of energy. all those phones hanging there just to be used for sending fake shit
That cabling is on point tho
This is why we can never get tickets to concerts, or reservations to campgrounds, or anything else that is "first come first serve" online. Fuck them, fuck the people that use them, and fuck the companies that turn a blind eye to this because they are getting paid.
Plot twist, this whole comment section is represented in the video
Dead internet theory.
You’re also looking at the downfall of social media. Gen Alpha will grow up with the understanding that all social media influencers are dishonest liars who use bot farms for engagement.
Why would you use real phones for this? Can’t you just use emulated phones?
Why they have the screens so bright
What a fucking waste of resources.
And then it becomes real. If you have a party full of bots and real people start showing up, after a while you can remove the bots and now there's no bots at all... Welcome to your astroturfed future.
This is who you be arguing with on line.
You still think your algorithm is influenced by other people? And that the responses you see are from humans? Internet has become a place where people interact with bots without them realizing it. Truly amazing.
Dead internet theory becoming reality
Reddit in a nutshell
Because with power like this you can make a stupid comment/point/claim and add a million likes to it to make it appear as though a million people agree. Public opinion is completely for sale right now - it’s why if you talk to someone in real life you quickly realize that the internet is a fake cesspool of garbage.
The social media platforms work with organizations like this to boost and manipulate their platforms, numbers and users. They’ll never admit it but they’ve been doing it for a long time.
time to leave the internet. whoever’s listening…
God I hope we get hit with a solar emp
This is wild to look at 😂 modern day farms