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Comment by ElFitz | Hacker News Reader

True. But a simple API to generate junk text? It can scale, cheaply, beyond measure.

No need for a troll farm, hiring, managing and training tens or hundreds of people.

A reasonable amount of cash, a bit of motivation, some moderate technical skills, and voilà! Anyone can compete with the Russian troll farms now and build their own networks of hundreds or hundreds of thousands sufficiently credible (as humans) fake accounts spewing garbage and patting each other on the back via likes, retweets and whatnots.

All with the appropriate fake news blogs and sites happily churning out grammatically correct nonsense that makes (enough) sense.

Basically, this kid’s dream: https://www.nbcnews.com/news/world/fake-news-how-partying-ma...

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But even Russian/Chinese bots can step up as it is much easier now to flood forums (like reddit) etc, where e.g. a China critic article appears to kill any discussion.

Oh, definitely. Existing operations also absolutely can leverage that in order to amplify their reach and capabilities.

I find it easier to identify humans that flood forums though. Especially non-native speakers usually are somewhat easy to spot, I assume that's true in any language. That's different for ML-generated texts. On the other hand, human texts are more "on message", but if all you want to do is create noise, I guess you don't need to have targeted communications.

> if all you want to do is create noise, I guess you don't need to have targeted communications.

This is key in anti-extremist operations on anonymous boards. 4chan and other similar sites are absolutely nothing like they were a decade ago, I presume because of such bots flooding them with noise.

And unfortunatley, the web will be forced to move toward verified human identities to fight with such junk and anonymous browsing will become a thing of the history.

That wouldn't work. You can already rent humans and sim cards to do captchas and phone verification. There's nothing stopping someone from verifying their bots.

It might be neither easy nor impossible. You could imagine s reputation system that depended on what others thought of you. Start the network with just people the developers know personally. Admit new people when enough existing members couch for them. Sometimes fake cancers will appear, but they'll sometimes get sniffed out, and the people who let them in punished somehow (temporarily blocked? Delete photos at random? Idk) strictly enough that people generally don't want to let in bad actors.

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