scronch

1. COMMIT TO THE BIT

2. PARTAKE IN THE DIVINE ACT OF CREATION

1) Be funny/ continue the online joke: persona you are conveying ( Think Gorbachev)

2) Have sex/fuck someone ( It is specifying say straight sex but we can ignore that part on tumblr)

To explain, in the previous bot plague it was discovered that individual upticks in bot follows happened after you were followed by a scout account. These were a bit difficult to find because they weren't empty accounts; they often (but not always) have default avatars, but sometimes had a tagline and background, convincing usernames, and had just enough reblog activity that a cursory scroll through their account wouldn't get them instantly blocked. They were really difficult to suss out unless you didn't have many followers and could inspect every recent follow. The telltale signs for the ones I always find are that:

They don't have anything in common with my interests, even though they follow me,

They never tag or comment, or the tags are suspiciously generic with no personality or system,

They followed me without any interaction (a human *usually* tends to like/reblog a bunch of your stuff before following)

(Had to see this on desktop) Their reblog activity is centered around the date they followed me, and does not extend far beyond that.

The tumblog that helped to organize the efforts against the bot infestation back in 2018 was @purgethebots!

So I did a little comment/notes backreading from the @purgethebots account, and one of the useful bits of info is the url to the bot farmers' forums. (I won't post those, but if you read through the replies of the post with the first screenie of the bot farmer whose accounts got mass-banned, a few forum sites are mentioned).

Unfortunately I didn't even know what to do with that info even in 2018, except read to see what difficulty our campaign was causing them and get an inkling of understanding of how the bots worked.

From what I understand, it was always about farming link traffic to make money from whatever porn site, or maybe phishing (I don't know since I never click the links), but it seems they are trying to do this as more passive income so it's probably typical link-clicky ad revenue bs. It appears they are scraping comments and follower lists for accounts to follow (possibly from the scout accounts, or people whose follower lists are visible). This means they're latching onto posts and accounts with lots of interaction and big followership, same as before.

And the comments are gold

(+Extra)