[LaMarseillaise]

Last week, I looked at the comments on a YouTube video about the Afghanistan withdrawal. I noticed something suspicious: two comments with a similar political view ended with a few whitespaces and a pipe character (“|”), and had generic user names. Then I looked again - there were actually dozens of comments like this on the video!

I know exactly what happened: the programmer used the wrong delimiter. It makes me wonder how many times the programmer did not make such a mistake.

[ergot_vacation]

Where this gets really sinister is that instances like this can blend and merge with apophenia. Genuine cases of botting lead to people looking for more, and seeing patterns where there aren't any. There have been a few cases of voice assistants passing info on to ad networks, and so now people attribute near black-magic level surveillance abilities to them. Not that I'm complaining; if this is what it takes for people to finally throw out their Alexa, so be it. But it is interesting that gas-lighting can have unexpected negative consequences. Unsurprisingly, people start to get jumpy and irrational when you fuck with their reality.