General Discussion
In reply to the discussion: Was DU also inundated with Fake Russian bots and Fake news during elections? [View all]ColemanMaskell
(783 posts)Apparently some bot programs are also self-replicating, making it hard to get rid of them. Like gnats, if you get rid of one, another appears. It's AI (artificial intelligence) of a sort. So a "bad guy" releases a swarm (many copies) of a Siri-like program specially-tailored to search the net (Google-like) for certain keywords and phrases it has on a built-in list, and then when a copy of the program finds a comment thread with some of the text it's looking for, it joins in and creates a somewhat Siri-like conversation, but more like a nightmare version of Siri, call it Siri's evil twin. I doubt they were targeted directly at Dem U so much as they were targeted to look for certain keywords and phrases that would be found in abundance on DU.