And you as the operator of the bot would just end up in a war with people who have different ways of expressing the same thing without using those words. You’d be spending all your time doing that, and lest we forget, there are a lot more people who want to disrupt these bots than there are people operating them. So you’d lose that fight. You couldn’t win without writing a preprocessor so strict that the bot would be trivially detectable anyway! In fact, even a very loose preprocessor is trivially detectable if you know its trigger words.
The thing is, they know this. Having a few bots get busted like this isn’t that big a deal, any more than having a few propaganda posters torn off of walls. You have more posters, and more bots. The goal wasn’t to cover every single wall, just to poison the discourse.
The goal wasn’t to cover every single wall, just to poison the discourse.
They’ve successfully done that anyways even if all their bots get called out, because then they will have successfully gotten everyone to think everyone else is a bot, and that the solution and way to figure out if they’re bots is to basically just post spam at them. Luckily, people on the internet have been doing this for the past 20 years anyways, so it probably doesn’t matter and they’ve really done nothing.
And you as the operator of the bot would just end up in a war with people who have different ways of expressing the same thing without using those words. You’d be spending all your time doing that, and lest we forget, there are a lot more people who want to disrupt these bots than there are people operating them. So you’d lose that fight. You couldn’t win without writing a preprocessor so strict that the bot would be trivially detectable anyway! In fact, even a very loose preprocessor is trivially detectable if you know its trigger words.
The thing is, they know this. Having a few bots get busted like this isn’t that big a deal, any more than having a few propaganda posters torn off of walls. You have more posters, and more bots. The goal wasn’t to cover every single wall, just to poison the discourse.
They’ve successfully done that anyways even if all their bots get called out, because then they will have successfully gotten everyone to think everyone else is a bot, and that the solution and way to figure out if they’re bots is to basically just post spam at them. Luckily, people on the internet have been doing this for the past 20 years anyways, so it probably doesn’t matter and they’ve really done nothing.