If you have spent any amount of time on social media in the past five years or so, you may have done some comment section surfing on those viral videos that pop up on your timeline. Tens of thousands of likes, thousands of shares, hundreds of comments, all for the content to be potentially misleading or altogether untrue. However, engagement keeps the posts pulse beating at a steady pace, exposing more and more users to its existence.
Comment sections are notorious for being a modern-day battle ground of extremes. It is a great place to visit if you want your cortisol to soar to legendary levels, and dare I say, may be even more insufferable to read than Reddit. And when all hope seems lost and I am almost positive that the majority of humanity is doomed to a future of digital nothings, I look at some data to remind myself just how fake most interactions online really are. If you find yourself in a heated debate with a troll or faceless account on a potentially sensitive post, there is about a 60% chance that the “person” you’re arguing with is one of the following:
- An AI powered bot designed to chime in on certain posts just to sew division and engagement. This is not a real person and you can usually tell if it is a bot by the way they do not interact with others after they’ve made their initial, shock-for-value comment. The goal is to get people enraged so that they comment back to him, which drives more and more engagements to the post, thus, accelerating its exposure.
- A troll is a real person, but with an account that has little to no activity of its own (think 0’s across the board). Most likely a bored teen or someone with a lot of pent-up rage, ready to take it out on the masses of the digital world. According to the Wall Street Journal, Facebook alone is currently struggling to keep track of just how many accounts even exist on the platform, but that “32% to 56% were opened by existing users rather than brand-new individuals”. So for arguments sake let’s call it 45%. Imagine that 45% of all of the new accounts being opened on a daily basis are owned by an existing user. That’s almost half of the users on Facebook that own more than one account.
- A “bot farm” operator “is an individual or group that controls a network of automated software scripts, artificial intelligence agents, or physical devices (such as smartphones) configured to mimic human behavior online at a large scale”, according to TrafficGuard. Bot farms are a bit more imposing than the latter. These digital coordinations seek to manipulate social media and its users by purposely posting radical and divisive content. There is also the danger of fraud and scams. However, the worst of these crimes is the content scrapping. Content scraping occurs when a bot is able to hack into a users web content, gaining access to personal data such as email addresses, phone numbers, social media accounts, and in some cases, bank information.
On April 15, online privacy advocate company Surfshark posted to Facebook,
- Block any users you suspect of being a bot. When you block them, you will also be blocking any other accounts that were made under that email address.
- Report them. Even though it may feel like a longshot, you can always report suspected bot or scam activity to Meta directly from your own account.
- Set your profile to private. Only add people you know.
- Expand your privacy settings. If you don’t want to be private, you can still restrict accounts, and limit who can engage on your page.
- Take a break from social media altogether and keep in mind: half of it, if not most of it, is completely fake.
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