Social Media has a bot problem

Image Credit: WSJ

An article from WSJ describes how "online armies take on defense work and information policy for Elon Musk" via tech blogs and social media.

In addition, Tesla's clean-energy division Tesla Energy is alleged to have a team dedicated to searching for customer complaints on social media and asking them to delete their comments. A separate team is dedicated to managing negative social media posts aimed specifically at Elon Musk. (hello team Musk, your boss needs to go to jail!)

Researchers found 186 bot accounts on Twitter that have consistently published positive sentiments about Tesla, which they say "may have buffered the Tesla narrative from an emergent group of critics, relieved downward pressure on the Tesla stock price and amplified pro-Tesla sentiment from the time of the firm's IPO in June 2010 to the end of 2020."

As of 2022 neither Instagram, nor Facebook, nor Reddit, nor even LinkedIn have been able to fully eliminate platform automation/spam bots. It's important to note that social media automation isn't always black or grey hat. It's sometimes white hat.

Automation is typically done via headless browsers, hence imitating human action, or via API. Today's Twitter automations tools use both. Black hat/grey hat spammers usually focus on automating the mass dm function & the mass mention function. Both functions create a notification in the recipients account which drives to the spammer's offers.

White-hat Twitter auto-responders though, also use the exact same mechanism. They simply have a different motive.