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Disney Youtube Bots

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I don’t know how many people are familiar with this, but it’s apparently a big marketing thing for companies to inflate their social media presence in order to push their products. They will allocate a budget for inflating their Youtube views and Facebook likes (keep that in mind the next time you see Star Wars: The blah blah blah official trailer, break the all-time record for Youtube views in one day).

I was just looking around at one of Disney’s recent releases on Youtube and, although it’s supposed to be against Youtube (Google’s) policy, a quick scan can find hundreds of bot posts across the comments sections. Just to verify, I went ahead and viewed these pages with several different accounts, and what happens is that if you reply to these bots, your posts will be visible to yourself only, but if you view with another account, you see your posts are invisible. So there is clearly some collaboration going on between Youtube and companies that are paying them (like Disney).

Here’s a video I quickly pulled up on Youtube comment botting:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MeHJysMJBaY

Honestly I just posted this to rant because I’m sick of fake movies, fake CGI, fake singing, fake marketing, fake social media promotion, fake everything.

**** off Disney with your fake Star Wars and fake everything.

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A digital wrinkle on an old hoodwink. How many quotes have you seen on a ad, or on a video box from some critic you’ve never heard of? I’m suspicious of those ads that use people coming out of the theater singing the praises of a film myself.

Being a savvy consumer is the best defense.

Sony got caught having used a fake movie critic to generate positive reviews back in 2000.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Manning_(fictitious_writer)

It’s believed by some the IMDB shut down it’s message boards to appease the studios.

Where were you in '77?

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Man, this is some low-quality bait, but screw it.

Sure, Disney, a multi-billion dollar company, would use some shitty script kiddy comment bot from over a year ago to spam YouTube’s comments with…something.

Also, now I could be wrong here, but a commenter can’t block other comments from public view. Either the commenter closed replies for their comment (and you wouldn’t be able to reply to them), or you said something the uploader blacklisted for the comments. (Yes, YouTube uploaders can add certain words to a blacklist that automatically hides comments that contain said words).

From the way I’d see it, it’s like if you go to Star Tours or whatever at Disney World, start screaming like an autist at every living being that approaches you, don’t be surprised when security kicks you out. This isn’t some kind of grand conspiracy.

What, a man builds a giant mound of dirt in his house and you aren’t entertained?

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SilverWook said:

A digital wrinkle on an old hoodwink. How many quotes have you seen on a ad, or on a video box from some critic you’ve never heard of? I’m suspicious of those ads that use people coming out of the theater singing the praises of a film myself.

Being a savvy consumer is the best defense.

Sony got caught having used a fake movie critic to generate positive reviews back in 2000.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Manning_(fictitious_writer)

It’s believed by some the IMDB shut down it’s message boards to appease the studios.

Interesting. Never heard of the David Manning thing before. I always wondered about Roger Ebert giving ROTS 3.5/4 stars for that POS film. Of course, there is a lot of that quid pro quo stuff that goes on in the investment world too, where ratings agencies and analysts collude with hedge funds and investment banks to move asset prices.

Your advice to be a saavy consumer is spot on.

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Some of Ebert’s reviews can be mind boggling, (especially viewed from the distance of time) but I don’t think he was taking anything under the table. He often went against the grain on movies that were ultimately very popular, or otherwise well received by other critics.

Where were you in '77?

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SilverWook said:

Some of Ebert’s reviews can be mind boggling, (especially viewed from the distance of time) but I don’t think he was taking anything under the table. He often went against the grain on movies that were ultimately very popular, or otherwise well received by other critics.

IIRC, he bashed Alien upon release, but a decade or two later he went back and started singing it’s praises. Ebert was just weird.

What, a man builds a giant mound of dirt in his house and you aren’t entertained?

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I wanted to pull an Elvis after watching Siskel & Ebert more than once back in the day. They did sing the praises of Laserdisc over VHS though. 😉

Where were you in '77?

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Wow you really blew the lid off the whole thing, congrats