Despite the platforms’ best efforts to eliminate them, porn bots are more or less ingrained in the social media experience. We’re used to seeing them populate the comment sections of memes and celebrity posts, and if you have a public account, you’ve probably seen them viewing and liking your stories. But their behavior keeps changing slightly to get ahead of the automated filters, and now things start to get weird.
Although porn bots once tried to lure people in with reprehensible or even blatant hook lines (like the ever-popular, “DON’T WATCH MY STORY WHO DOESN’T WANT TO MASTURBATE!”), these days the approach is a bit more abstract. It has become common to see bot accounts posting a single, inappropriate, completely off-topic word sometimes accompanied by an emoji or two. In a recent post I came across, five separate spam accounts all using the same profile picture—a portrait of a man in a red thong swatting mosquitoes—commented: “Pristine 🌿,” “Music 🎶,” “Sapphire 💙,” “Tranquility 😌” and “ Faith.”
Another bot—whose profile picture is a headless frontal picture of someone’s body in underwear—commented “Michigan 🌟” on the same meme post. Once you notice them, it’s hard not to start keeping a mental journal of the most ridiculous situations. A bot wrote “🦄agriculture”. In another post: “terror 🌟” and “😍🙈bug.” The odd one word comment is everywhere; The porn bots seem to have completely lost it.
Indeed, what we see is the emergence of another evasive maneuver. That, and they can get a little lazy.
“They just want to have a conversation, so it doesn’t make sense for them to make a coherent sentence,” Satnam Narang, a research engineer at cybersecurity company Tenable, told Engadget. Narang, who has been investigating social media scams since the days of MySpace, explains that after scammers confuse their bots, they can pile other bots’ likes on top of those comments to boost them.
Using random words helps scammers fly under the radar of moderators looking for specific keywords. In the past, they have tried techniques such as putting a space or special character between the letters of each word that the system can tag. Narang said: “If they comment on the word ‘insect’ or ‘terror’, you can’t necessarily ban or delete the account because it’s too kind. But if they say, ‘Check my story’ or something.. . it can flag their systems. It’s a evasion method, and if you see them on these big name accounts, it’s clearly working. It’s just part of the dance.”
This dance is one of the social media platforms and bots have been around for years. Meta The suite of apps said it prevented millions of fake accounts from being created daily and caught “millions more, often minutes after they were created.” However, spam accounts are still common enough to show up en masse in high-traffic posts and creep into the story views of even users with small followings.
The company’s latest transparency report, which includes statistics on the number of fake accounts it has removed, shows that Facebook removed more than a billion fake accounts last year alone, but does not currently provide any data for Instagram. “Spammers use every platform at their disposal to deceive and manipulate people on the Internet, and are constantly adapting their tactics to evade enforcement,” a Meta spokesperson said. “That’s why we invest heavily in our enforcement and verification teams and have dedicated detection tools to identify spam.”
Last December, Instagram brought out a number of tools aims to give users more visibility into how they’re dealing with spam bots and give content creators more control over how they interact with these profiles. Account holders can now, for example, bulk delete follow requests from profiles flagged as potential spam. Instagram users have noticed a more frequent appearance of a “hidden comments” section under some posts, where comments marked as offensive or spam can be minimized.
“It’s a mole game,” said Narang, and the crooks win. “You think you’ve got it, but then it shows up somewhere else.” He says cheaters are very good at understanding why they’re banned and finding new ways to detect skirts accordingly.
One might assume that social media users these days would be too savvy to fall for obvious bot-written comments like “Michigan 🌟,” but according to Narang, scammers’ success isn’t all about tricking hapless victims into handing over their money. They often participate in affiliate programs, and all they need to do is get people to go to a website – usually an “adult dating service” or similar – and sign up for free. The bots’ “link in bio” usually redirects to an intermediary site that posts several URLs that can promise XXX chats or photos and lead to the service in question.
Scammers can charge a small amount of money, such as a dollar or more, for each real user who opens an account. If someone happens to sign up with a credit card, the payback will be higher. “Even if it’s one percent [the target demographic] sign up, you earn some money,” said Narang. “And if you’re running multiple, different accounts and have different profiles pushing those links, you’re probably making a decent chunk of change.” Instagram scammers may also have spam bots on TikTok, X and other sites, Narang said. “It all adds up.”
The damage from spam bots goes beyond any headaches that may result in a few deceived people signing up for an outdated service. Porn bots primarily use photos of real people they steal from public profiles, which can be embarrassing (speaking from personal experience here) after a spam account asks a friend to refer everyone the person pictured knows. The process of getting Meta to delete these cloned accounts can be labor intensive.
Their presence also adds to the challenges real content creators in sex and sex-related industries face on social media, which many rely on as a way to connect with a wider audience, but must constantly fight to avoid being deplatformed. Fake Instagram accounts can garner thousands of followers, driving potential visitors away from real accounts and raising doubts about their legitimacy. And real accounts are sometimes flagged as spam in Meta’s bot search, putting those with silly content at greater risk of account suspensions and bans.
Unfortunately, the bot problem is not one with an easy solution. “They are constantly inventing new ways [moderation]coming up with new schemes,” Narang said. Fraudsters will always be after money and, to that end, the crowd. While porn bots on Instagram have evolved to the point of posting nonsense to avoid moderators, Narang says, there are more on TikTok that target a younger demographic. sophisticated bots post somewhat convincing comments on Taylor Swift videos.
The next big thing in social media will inevitably come out sooner or later, and they will go there. Narang said that “as long as there is money to be made, there will be incentives for these fraudsters.”
