It looks like a joke now but I'm fairly convinced that in the not too distant future the most influential social media accounts will be run by some kind of AI.
Who knows, maybe they already are? I mean I'm confident there's a ton of content farms out there already that just run a cronjob every couple minutes to pluck the top ten images off of a subreddit, checks if they've been published on their own channel yet and republishes them.
If not, I'll brb, need to set up some websites / facebook accounts.
9gag was caught out a few years back for automatically harvesting images off the front page of reddit, then posting it to 9gag like it was from a "real user", and artificially inflating the upvotes.
You could tell it was automated, because every once in a while, a very reddit specific meme would appear on the 9gag front page, with a bunch of confused comments from 9gag users who didn't understand it. Here's a writeup from a couple of years ago on it [1]
I don't doubt that other clickbait sites like BoredPanda do exactly the same thing.
If not, I'll brb, need to set up some websites / facebook accounts.