Internet (Social) Media manipulation

[RJM Corbet]

I don't know if this is the right forum, or the right thread title, but IMO this is interesting and up-to-date stuff. The poster 'Smarter Every Day' is actually literally a rocket engineer, so his credentials seem to be ok:

 

[RJM Corbet]

 

[Brian G Turner]

That's really interesting, but I already figured that his YouTube examples were more about revenue generation.

These people are effectively "spamming" YouTube in order to generate views fast, and by hacking old accounts and publishing autogenerated content it means they can become eligible for advertising in a scaleable way.

It's not all that different in principle to what used to happen on the internet with spam webpages trying to rank and gain clicks for no other reason than to monetize junk automated content. However, the stuff on YouTube looks quite sophisticated, but again it's automated junk content.

The political content appears to have no ideological function (certainly in his original examples) - they are simply trying to tap into something that was trending at the time. Luckily for spammers, Twitter does publish trending topics, and trending news is easy to find on Google News - to be fed back into YouTube, which is another Google platform.

 

[RJM Corbet]

That's really interesting, but I already figured that his YouTube examples were more about revenue generation.

These people are effectively "spamming" YouTube in order to generate views fast, and by hacking old accounts and publishing autogenerated content it means they can become eligible for advertising in a scaleable way.

It's not all that different in principle to what used to happen on the internet with spam webpages trying to rank and gain clicks for no other reason than to monetize junk automated content. However, the stuff on YouTube looks quite sophisticated, but again it's automated junk content.

The political content appears to have no ideological function (certainly in his original examples) - they are simply trying to tap into something that was trending at the time. Luckily for spammers, Twitter does publish trending topics, and trending news is easy to find on Google News - to be fed back into YouTube, which is another Google platform.

Ok. I'm sure you have a lot of experience. I use You Tube. But Facebook and Twitter are anathema to me. Of course WhatsApp is an incredible service for instantly keeping in touch with anyone anywhere. To me WhatsApp is basically the perfect outcome for personal internet.