It has skyrocketed lately: bots that just follow a bunch of people. And that’s all they do. They always have a female name and an attractive woman as a profile pic. They never make any posts, ever. They always follow hundreds or thousands of other people, and have 10 to 20 followers. As far as I can tell they all joined between July and November of 2023.
What’s the point? It’s gotta be some kind of scam, but what’s the scam?
Edit: I found one that actually made a post! https://i.imgur.com/ukAasU6.png Keep in mind this is the only post they ever made, and it is not in response to anything. It is just a stand-alone post.
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It makes it easier to extract data from all of those people they follow, and people they follow. Emulating a user and scraping some user content and the people they follow content, and so on. It can bypass twitter’s api.
Buying followers is a very lucrative for up and coming influencers. You want to appear big so people follow your brand. That brand gets you money shilling garbage products like manscape.
The point of the bots following randoms is that it helps avoid detection of both the account being a bot and the account buying follows. If they only followed certain accounts, it is easier to detect. They follow a bunch of randomness to appear real.
Those things are so annoying.
I’ll make replies on posts, and the only ‘likes’ I’ll get are from those damn bots.
I always go and block them, because it just feels scummy to have your only acknowledgement be a slutty, scammy, un-real bot.
Same on twitch for selling bots that look legit and less likely to get banned. Although at one point Twitch banned a bunch of bots and large streamers took a noticeable hit on followers. xQc lost 2 million out of 8 million followers.
ANOTHER TAKE is that sooner or later the bots can start having conversations that are undetable, between each other and other humans, taking this mess to the next level. ive already seen it.
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