There is a phenomenon going on right now where tiny sites are getting knocked offline due to sudden traffic, basically DDOSing them. It has been found that the automation of these bot farms sends out scrapers to find new places where you can post on the site. Like anything, anything hat allows you to post anything on the site. So it will find some tiny store’s webfront, see it has a place for customer reviews, and then tell the bot farm it has found new land. The place then gets swarmed with bot traffic.
So literally everywhere you can post anything is getting bot traffic right now.
Aceticon@lemmy.dbzer0.com 5 months ago
I used to think like that until on the e-mail address I had for my lemmy.world account (an account which I left following that) I started getting e-mails in my native language from an organisation based in Tel-Aviv inviting me to attent a “learn about Israel” online course.
This was when I was already very vocal about the actions of Israel in Gaza.
That e-mail wasn’t public and as far as I know only server Admins have access to that stuff.
When the largest Lemmy instance is infiltrated at the Admin level by state actors (and that’s also very clearly the case for Moderation in the main forums there, as reflected by their moderation actions with even one Moderator of the news forum being very openly Zionist in his posts elsewhere), the idea that there are bots and sockpuppets around in Lemmy trying to shift opinions for the benefit of nations and even large political forces, isn’t exactly outrageous.
I mean, if I remember it correctly the budget of Israel’s Hasbara ops is somewhere around $1 billion a year, so plenty of money to have a few people at least part time trying to influence a place with maybe a few hundred thousand people, like Lemmy.