• Zaktor
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    8 hours ago

    How could you tell anything by their profiles? Most had no content or other information. It’s not like Reddit where you can view their comments.

    • merdaverse@lemmy.world
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      7 hours ago

      I checked the super generic comments that seemed AI generated. Some of them had content like videos or decent descriptions. Others had profiles that were as old as 10 years. If they were bots I would expect them to be created in the last few years. There’s a few that are suspicious, but it was maybe 2 in 15 accounts. They could also be hacked accounts.

      • Zaktor
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        5 hours ago

        I only saw one that had videos and one that had a playlist of some videos of a rightwing influencer. I wouldn’t take account age to be a sign of not-bot, both because of compromised accounts as you mentioned and because YouTube botting has been going on for a long time now. It’s 20 years old at this point and video monetization was introduced pretty soon after creation.

        Here’s their anti-bot policy page from 2014: https://web.archive.org/web/20140209083324/https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/3399767?hl=en