[benbowdene]

I've noticed what I belive to be fake YouTube comments around politics and financial topics especially. For example, sometimes I'll watch a video related to the US stock market or currencies and then in the comments there will be a heavy bias against US corporations or the USD. I remember one video talking about stocks dropping had maybe ~60 comments in total, yet ~50 of which all heavily biased towards China and talked about how China is great and the USD will fall. Which I understand people out there have that opinion, but seeing 50 people all saying basically the same thing seemed like a well-orchestrated plot.

I've noticed many instances of this and usually, I like looking at comments to find different views or different opinions but sometimes it's a bit too unanimous. I have a suspicion that many of the top comments are fake and made to look like a bunch of random people commenting on the video when it's really a group of people that are trying to change how people think. Which sounds silly but people follow the masses, if the majority of YouTube comments are saying that x thing is bad/good, then people just see that and start believing it as fact since everyone else seems to belive it. I mean the entire comment section is saying that x person is bad, plus there's 100 upvoted on the first comment going into why that is, sooo it must be true :P

[skybrian]

If you read a lot of comments on the same subject, they all start to look the same after a while. I don't know how you could tell the difference between a bot and a bunch of people who share the same ideology.

Either way, it's not a random sample, which is what you'd really need to gauge average opinion.

[TranceMan]

Good Bot :)

Sorry, seriously though, have you noticed this with HN comments? I sometimes get that feeling when browsing here, I really notice it on the comments that immediately flood in when Apple are having a conference....

[benbowdene]

To be clear, I wouldn't say it's a fully programmed bot. It's probably a real human writing the "fake" comments. I wouldn't be shocked if a couple of governments had tens of thousands of YouTube accounts that they created many years ago and then let age and try to make it act like a real account for a couple of years. Of course, over time they'd start using it to write comments that are related to their agenda. Say, every 30th comment or so could be related to pushing their agenda and as long as each comment is different it'd be hard to ban such an account.

This type of operation sounds silly until you realize you could push your agenda to tens of millions of unique people reading the comments section on YouTube alone. If this idea sounds crazy, just remember the recent US elections were found to have a similar scenario occur with fake websites being pushed on various social media platforms and eventually people believed and trusted the articles written on the sites and started reposting, liking, etc. the fake news.

"have you noticed this with HN comments?" As for HN comments, I don't spend a lot of time reading through comments here to know. I'd assume that it happens on every social media platform. If this is occurring on YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter, then every platform is in the targets. It's all about the eyeballs, so I'd be shocked if there weren't already thousands of fake accounts already opened either aging or already in use on HN. If I were running this type of operation, I'd have thousands of accounts on each platform: Pinterest, Twitch, Quora, TikTok, Snapchat, you name it, I'd have it. If it has millions of users per month and is a social media platform where discussions and opinions occur *or might occur in the future (new potential features on places like Snapchat), you better believe I'd have accounts on it.