
The Black Market for Social Media Manipulation - manigandham
https://www.stratcomcoe.org/black-market-social-media-manipulation
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namanyayg
This is a very basic article, but presents a decent outline of this niche. As
they say, all of this is very open and available on the clearnet anyway.

One technique used by those "high end" account creators: they all network with
each other irl, add their (1000s) of fakes as friends with each other, and
hire staff to send random chat messages to all friends every day. Do this over
time and you extend the hidden limits set by FB on adding friends and sending
messages.

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dvt
This isn't anything new. A buddy of mine ran a "company" that sold backlinks
(mostly low quality garbage) about a decade ago -- the company was making 7
figures yearly. At around the same time, I figured out how to game the
StumbleUpon algorithm and was selling front page spots (for like $1k a spot)
with my sister.

It doesn't surprise me that this is still happening. There's money to be made,
but there's a lot of risk involved with greyhat/blackhat business models.
Being young and dumb helps.

~~~
kristintynski
hahah, my brother and I also sold gamed StumbleUpon front page, and digg, and
early reddit, and delicious back in the day and sold it as a service. It was
insane how easy it used to be...

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techntoke
I think it is pretty obvious that these companies have built pretty
sophisticated scrappers for social media sites as well to bypass any API or
ToS restrictions. Twitter bots for politics aren't even hidden. Reddit has a
huge problem with social media manipulation as well.

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hummel
The best part of this basic article is that probably cost 250k to EUR
taxpayers and provided 0 insight, keeping the wheel of fraud spinning.

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HNisCurated
This should start to be tracked.

I caught Aldi advertising with Reddits frugal board.

Young accounts, lots of Aldi Love.

That marketing company has gotten better.

I find it awful HN mods won't let this be discussed. Is HN manipulated? Why
wouldn't it be?

~~~
dang
We spend a lot of time addressing readers' concerns about the integrity of HN.
I did so just this morning:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20508960](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20508960).

The main constraint is that answering these questions thoroughly is time- and
energy-intensive. Since our resources are limited, this quickly eats into the
other things we need to do to keep HN up and make it better. So we have to be
careful how we engage. That mostly means answering users who have substantive
questions and good-faith concerns, and avoiding getting lost in the forests
that the wilder kinds of insinuations lead to. The internet is a gigantic
Rohrschach test that is all too ready to supply whatever people want to see.

~~~
noname120
Would it be possible to add the invited page
([https://news.ycombinator.com/invited](https://news.ycombinator.com/invited))
to the lists page?
[https://news.ycombinator.com/lists](https://news.ycombinator.com/lists)

It would be super helpful to also provide a 'lobbed' page. I didn't know about
this practice, and I'm sure many other users don't know about this either.
It's important in my opinion for the sake of transparency.

~~~
dang
We'll add the lobbed page once it exists. The invited page probably doesn't
belong there since the distinction between invited and reupped is just an
accident of timing.

