I do find it interesting that thousands of discrete devices is somehow easier than them virtualising them devices.
this post was submitted on 27 Nov 2025
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Virtualization is easily detected.
And, i assume, those devices have each different WAN addresses
It would be to obvious, if all of them would have the same..
Yeah but why would facebook/x bother to check? Engagement is engagement. They already know there are millions of bots and don’t care.
And yet it's weird how much they care about you trying to use Facebook marketplace without a phone number, drivers license, a key to your house, your social security number, and the name of your first pet
My guess: it is a low hanging fruit and then they can say "Look! We blocked X million bots! So you can trust the users that are left...... please don't look into it any more"
because people used to do this all the time with ads: serve up an ad click, get paid… so spin up a bunch of clients and have them click ads on your site, easy money!
shareholders want real users, not bots. Facebook has to tell shareholders that real eyeballs are looking at ads, not virtual ones. Facebook is an adtech company—all tech they develop further establishes their advertisement empire, if advertisers (or more specifically, investors) find out ads on facebook aren't worth their value, then facebook dies.
Absolutely but so does reddit, they all make a great effort to not notice bot accounts.
It would be easy to identity many bots by their browsing habits and other digital markers but they obfuscate all data that may give an indication of real users because, as you say, any drop in reported users is a drop in ad value.
They obfuscate for us. There is no way they don't know. But bots do drive engagement.
Pretty sure they only care because they could get in trouble for shareholder faud
No that’s why they never release any data about bots. That way they can pretend every account is a real user.
Probably it's cheaper to get 60 used low-end devices than one device that can run 60 copies of the Facebook app.
Bingo. People treat phones like they're disposable, and buying pallets of old functional phones is shockingly affordable
People trade their old phones in when they buy new ones or donate them to random causes.
This here is where those old phones end up.
Forgive my ignorance, why is there a wall of cellphones?
This is what a bot farm looks like
aka this is who you’re arguing with online.
This is what a lot of Lemmy traffic comes from.
Do you really believe, that lemmy is big enough for them to care?
-This comment brought to you by a bot™
beep boop
Giving helpful instructions is not among the activities bot farms are involved with.
There's more phones on that rack than active Lemmy accounts
This is the .ml server
How is it used? Are they remotely controlled by computer somehow or do they need someone going from phone to phone, putting stuff in manually?
Low wage employees go over the boards of phones all day
Things phones and humans have in common in Asia: they're very cheap to procure.
It is sad, and heartbreaking, and true.
How much is a lot in this context?
Stick around long enough and pay attention and you’ll see.
Things relating to: Israel, Gaza, discussions of capitalism, “east” vs “west”, USA imperialism, the Uyghur Genocide, the genocide of the Palestinian people, the cultural revolution, great leap, Soviets, etc
^ suddenly there are a lot more people on Lemmy when these topics come up. Voting is transparent.
I wish we could locally delete votes from specific instances with our clients.
Lemmy is almost designed to be able to be astroturded.
You're looking at 7x14 cellphones per rack and at least 5 racks. So 490 phones. Each of them will have Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, YouTube, Reddit and so on installed. A setup like that will give you the power to immediately downvote a Reddit post 500 times or to sell 500 followers on Instagram, boost a TikTok video with 500 views or post 500 comments to YouTube. You can play your YouTube video 500 times and earn money by doing that. Or you could totally kill every Lemmy post critizising the communist party of China by downvoting it 500x and posting 500 negative comments.
And yes, there are thousands of those operations around
It's sadly very wrong.
The person selling the hat is also making fun and laughing at you. And has your personal information
That's not wrong. Just incomplete
A watermark and a social media user, gross.
Back in my day we had standards and people were expected to crop out all that bullshit before posting a meme.
and not just any social media: threads
Arguably, the BEST place to post these memes.
We're not reaching people by circle-jerking in largely leftist spaces like this, we reach people by going into their spaces and mixing with the morons and zombies and shoving their face in reality. When did progressives get so fucking soft FFS
I agree with this. I'll even say fine follow the ugly conventions in those spaces and use watermarks to push people to leftist channels on those platforms.
That said, we are deep in the trenches here in this Lemmy community, not in the friendly outreach programs, so when dropping your meme here specifically, crop that bullshit out.
The master's tools will never dismantle the master's house. Reach them in the workplace, at home, in actual reality.
I say that a lot, it doesn't go over well in spaces like Lemmy where the average user has been locked in their room for a week straight with their discord polycule obsessing about the latest poorly written anime.
I have and do change people in real life, it's far easier than it seems but we have a generation of incredibly isolated and avoidant young people who see even the slightest resistance or friction as a massive, insurmountable obstacle which signifies you shouldn't even try and everything is hopeless.
You should watch the film "Threads" from 1981 I think.
Everyone should watch "Threads", the film from 1981 I think.
Oh man, good thing they changed colors and bolded part of it. I would have been totally lost.
Can I get a useless red circle? Totally lost over here.
No arrows? Downvote.
Man I should build a pyramid.