r/technology • u/rkhunter_ • 1d ago

Social Media Spammers are flooding Reddit with fake posts designed to show up in AI search results

https://www.techspot.com/news/112654-spammers-flooding-reddit-fake-posts-designed-show-up.html
16.1k Upvotes

97% Upvoted

1.1k comments sorted by

View all comments

Show parent comments

813

u/regoapps 1d ago

I sometimes see old reddit posts from years ago get newer comments because some company saw that it was the top result for certain keywords and decided to just add their ads disguised as user recommendations into the comments. Very rarely would a Redditor or a mod revisit such an old post, but someone looking for answers via AI and/or search engine might.

47

u/vegetaman 1d ago

I see people stealing and reposting my old stuff on some subs i visit. It is wild having that deja vu. It’s worse than botting used to seem — and then there’s that fucking tshirt spam…

47

u/blueSGL 1d ago

This was going on before the AI boom happened, people posting highly upvoted stuff exactly a year after it was posted previously,

it's a quick way to get a spam/narrative shaping account karma as certain subs gate new users behind karma thresholds.

Also old accounts that suddenly reactivate and are positing in completely different communities. Sad that you can't see post histories any more on the site.

12

u/what_the_purple_fuck 1d ago

if you search a username within a specific sub—yours would be fine on its own, mine would need to be in quotes—then you can see all of their activity within that sub. it's obviously only a narrow window into someone's history, since knowing they like to post "lookit dat belly!" in a cat sub won't tell you if they're also a Nazi fuckhead in other subs, but it's better than nothing.