I undestand bots in discussions, trying to sway views of readers and make some issues more visible. What is there to be achieved by bots reposting innocent memes and pictures?
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In a social network, if an attacker’s bots predominantly only interact with other bots also run by that attacker it can be easy to identify them all and ban them. This is especially easy if all the bots that interact with each other are all doing the same thing too, creating posts about the same topic and upvoting posts made by the other bots.
A way to make this detection harder is called a Sybil attack – the attacker creates far more bots, but sets many of them to do more innocent things to make identifying whether the other accounts interacting with any particular bot are also bots or not murkier and harder to know for sure.
The rub to this strategy is that you’d need those accounts to do something else, ideally something easy to automate in a somewhat-authentic-looking way. The Sybils aren’t really helping directly with the real goal of the bot network, though, so they should be doing things that can be set up once and let to run without a lot of ongoing effort.
Memes are really good for this – they’ve been around for a while so there’s a lot of past examples to pull from, and don’t need to relate to current events or anything of that sort to make keeping them useful take more work than is needed.
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