This is some capitalist-nonsense FASCINATING: When I tried to search for the news of the Phillips cpap recall just now in tumblr's mobile search, I used the search term "cpap" and clicked on the "recent" tab to find it, and... got an unending load of advert spam accounts posting sales pitches and "advice" and such. It wasn't until I specifically searched for "cpap recall" that I found what I needed.
Now, maybe those accounts are on a queue -- lord knows mine usually is. But I was largely unaware that there were these random spam accounts, sitting out here affecting search algorithms, blocking important information, and not even putting in the effort to try and follow me like a good ol' fashioned pornbot.
And you can't report them -- they aren't spamming people's inboxes (hi pornbot again), and they aren't showing nipples (YES WE SEE YOU PORNBOT GOOD JOB), but they're just... out there. Quietly making the world a little worse by fucking with the data that populates a whole lot of the tech we're growing increasingly dependent on.
