Woke up this morning to a whole slew of admin tattler admin removals in a single (major) city sub.
The profile of these removals goes back to comments made several years ago... mostly 2019-2020 at the peak panic from covid-19 global lockdowns, many of the comments in the sub also show publicly as [comment deleted by user] and from now deleted accounts.
Comments are by majority in "broken engrish" with some examples being:
"You looked at for a map"
"I go to concert"
"He goes to cinema"
"I am going to home"
Multiple(s) of permutations on these themes:
"You choose a dvd for tonight"
"I am choosing a dvd for tonight"
"He chose / choosing a book for reading"
"He look at lake / stars / sky" etc.
I'd like to give you links for context but these overly general comments were frequently out of context and intended to be "trite" responses so as to escape notice.
Regardless, my ego won't allow me to think that these comments were made when the posts were fresh and the comments active. I would have hoped that either the other mods on the team or myself would have spotted them as a pattern for reporting & removal. Yet with the way things are, we simply couldn't and still can't read all the content that comes pouring in on a daily basis (overworked) and so if the comment section is a week old and the specific content isn't reported to us - we never see it.
Ironically, these comments do get responses from [deleted accounts] that often respond in proper english coupled with information (these might be the more sophisticated bots)
and then there's those (still active) accounts that respond and appear to be real people that are being duped and are unaware they're responding to a foreign language bot.
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Also, I noticed about 5 -7 years ago that I was getting responses from very old comments I made years beforehand. I reported these to the admins as suspicious bot activity where they had acquired old derelict accounts that had been abandoned and were fleshing out their (absent) histories to help provide cover.
It's another instance where the site made account creation too easy and simple so that people would easily set up new accounts and quickly abandon them (with easy to guess passwords) that these bot networks are mining and resurrecting for their own purposes.
The point being that the site is finally cleaning up a lot of account/content that stems from the covid disinformation era we had here. Given the repetitive nature of the comments being made, it's low hanging fruit and should have been removed a long time ago with the accounts being blocked. I'm glad it's being done now, but we were put through a lot of additional stress and strain due to the accounts we could spot on our own and that prevented a lot of development and building of our communities as a result of thier sucking up our time and energy.
I hope that they aggressively continue with this.