| HN Mirror

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.