Reposted by Katy Arnold
Katy Arnold
@katyarnie.bsky.social
990 followers 418 following 179 posts
Previously building and leading #UCD at Home Office Digital, now helping organisations with user research and digital transformation. Musician, feminist, wild swimmer, camper van owner. She/her.
![1
Nurse:
It’s become a real problem in this area
2
Nurse:
We’ve seen the whole community lost to addiction
3
Show a building sign posted:
Westminster ‘X’ Addiction Clinic
With various Westminster people or looking at their phones outside it
Nurse:
Ministers, Spads, Researchers…
4
Nurse:
Most mornings we’ll get a call about someone acting strangely
[Nurse on phone taking a call]
Ok - we’ll be right over
5
Nurse:
We just have a gentle chat
[Nurses approach a minister –Robert Jenrick? - standing in the Palace of Westminster
Minister:
I understand your concerns…
6
Nurse:
Are you OK love?
Minister:
Yes I’m just hearing legitimate concerns from real voters
7
Nurse:
That’s a robot, a Nazi and a poorly-disguised Russian
[Show that the people he is talking to are precisely these characters]
Nurse 2:
Give us your phone, love
8
Nurse:
At the clinic we put them in a Grass-Touching Pod, with a real voter to talk to
[We see them back at the clinic, holding the minister's head and pushing him into a glass isolation booth with a grass floor. And it is a baffled looking woman, on a chair, ready to talk to him.]
9
Minister:
YOU MUST BE WORRIED ABOUT THE COMING CIVIL WAR
[woman looks baffled]
10
woman:
I just want a bus service
Minister:
LOOK AT MY FLAG
[produces a St George's flag]
[ends]](https://cdn.bsky.app/img/feed_thumbnail/plain/did:plc:4m3we4apbjayclzcnhwe3pfp/bafkreicahofq6s4xow7vowj7dx6odw6ejdwr4kwcmzta7qwi4hg2nvywji)
![Denise Paolucci (rahaeli on Bluesky) cofounded blog site Dreamwidth and previously worked in trust and safety at LiveJournal. She has a ton of experience with every possible form of social media bad actor and regularly posts on Bluesky about trust and safety. Lately, she's been writing about our bot friends.
Paolucci thinks this particular wave of "reply guy as a service" bots are test runs by a spambot maker, who hopes to rent the bots out to other bad actors as a service: "It's common for spamming software to be pitched as social media management." [Bluesky]
Bad actors want to sort out what bot styles get the most responses for engagement farming. Bluesky is light on algorithms that filter what you can see, but spammers got in the habit of exploring how the algorithms work on Twitter, Facebook, and Threads so they could exploit them.
Some bots are being run to establish what can lower the quality of discussion on a platform. These bots may be political or commercial in intent. Twitter has long been overrun with this style of bot.
The bots also join followback and follow-for-follow hashtags. Content-scraper accounts are grown in the hope of selling the account to a spammer Bluesky has a large number of followback
accounts. Some of these accounts have already](https://cdn.bsky.app/img/feed_thumbnail/plain/did:plc:66lbtw2porscqpmair6mir37/bafkreidx5saezlmhms642lmv4eyzn637wqjd36zct7lrehnvos2vzfq7vu)
