You develop an intuition about genuine and fake user behavior after spending many years examining the traffic generated by a website and associated social media channels. Some social media posts generate a disproportionate number of ‘likes’ relative to the number of clicks through to an article; social media users are likely responding to the headline without caring to read the detail. Irrelevant comments are left in response to a social media post; the user incorrectly guessed the meaning of the post from its headline. And every so often you get a comment that is so bland and generic that you realize it had nothing to do with the post or its headline; the user is just harvesting attention for themselves by leaving huge numbers of comments everywhere. Commsrisk is already competing for attention with AI-generated websites so it was inevitable that AI would also be used to compete on social media too, sometimes by siphoning attention from the social media posts of others. My first real experience of this occurred last week, with a comment on a LinkedIn post from a new follower that said “nice share, thanks for the update” even though the positive tone of the comment jarred with the downbeat content of a post about crime. So I examined all the other LinkedIn comments from the same user that day…
Wow, this is groundbreaking!
Congratulations on your achievement!
You’re absolutely right! Success in the online world is within reach for everyone. Keep up the great work!
Exciting times ahead!
Well said!
Amazing insight! Thank you for sharing.
Looking forward to it!
Thanks for sharing your valuable insights! Excited to check out the details and examples.
Such valuable insights!
Very interesting topic!
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Great insights! Thanks for sharing.
SRK is truly an inspiration for reinventing himself and breaking records!
Thanks for sharing this insightful conversation!
Great insights, thanks for sharing!
Sounds like an innovative approach!
Such valuable advice! Learning from our mistakes and moving forward is the key to success.
That’s a great tip!
Great advice! Decisions can be tough, but being sure of them is definitely a superpower.
Awesome update!
Incredible insight!
Those are just some of the comments left by the user across a 24-hour period. The sheer number of comments, and the fact this user can maintain an extraordinary level of comment output day after day, indicates the comments have been created by a machine. The formula used to generate the comments is obvious, and well within the capabilities of AI. A positive statement is made, usually ending with an exclamation mark. If it is easy to repeat and reorder some of the words in the post then a second sentence is added to make the comment seem more authentic. For example, a post that says “Let me show you how to use A/B testing” will prompt a response of the type “That was a great example of A/B testing”. It is rather sad that some real people who posted to LinkedIn were duped into treating an automated comment as if it also came from a real user, thanking the machine for its interest.
The profile used to leave these comments belongs to a man who describes himself as an “AI automation agency”. This profile has an implausible range of interests, stretching from search engine optimization to stock market investments to gender equality to Indian film stars to congratulating the winners of niche business awards to the artificial inflation of telecoms traffic. I suspect the owner of this profile is only really interested in search engine optimization (SEO), where we should understand these words are really a euphemism for using any scummy and spammy technique to generate more internet traffic for yourself. SEO is just another rationalization of the modern psychopathic propensity to use networks to take something of value whilst giving nothing of value in return. Your time and attention is taken. You receive the output of a machine that mimics meaning but does not understand or care about anything.
This latest development is just another aspect of the general trend towards more and more artificial traffic on all kinds of networks. If the cost of additional traffic is zero, and a cheap machine can be constructed to produce traffic, then it is worth pumping out unlimited amounts of traffic even if each individual communication has only a very low probability of stimulating a profitable response. The same economic factors explain email spam, wangiri, artificial generation of SMS messages, and many other forms of network abuse. These are often treated as particular problems. They are representative of a general failing within society: anti-social behavior is amplified by modern technology and allowed to generate financial rewards without any fear of reprisals. LinkedIn should be stopping traffic like this but they, like the spammers, also profit from spam. These bogus comments help to fool human users, and advertisers, into thinking their activity on LinkedIn is more effective than it really is.
Selfish behavior on networks represents a real threat to a healthy society because it drowns out real dialogue between people. All our experience of artificial traffic tells us that warnings are not enough. We must block bad traffic and punish the people responsible. Otherwise they will clog and kill the channels of communication that real people want and need.
