i think someone i follow just turned into a bot???????? like since last night all they’ve posted are reblogs of fishy linked posts titled “Hot Girl Online” originating from the same deactivated blog and reblogged via another obvious bot blog. i’m losing my mind. they were a real person a day or two ago. what happened
I’ve been seeing this a lot, like a post that’s clearly a bot post shows up in my recommended posts and I go to the blog to report/block in and the first couple of posts are the spammy bullshit…and then the rest is…pretty much what you would expect from a typical Tumblr blog…
yeah someone else reblogged this and said in the tags they’d noticed bot posts on their dash too… so it’s obviously a thing. i already knew bots regularly seize deactivated urls for use, but these blogs don’t appear to have been deactivated before being seized, which is somewhat concerning. part of me wonders if the massive droves of people leaving for other social media in wake of the 17th have just left unprecedented numbers of urls open for swiping, or if something more sinister is happening here. it seems possible that they’re actually taking over active and/or archived accounts, but it’s unclear how they’d go about that, so i’m not jumping to any conclusions yet.
definitely unsettling though. i hope this mystery gets solved soon. i’ll be keeping a much closer eye on my archived blogs in the meantime
okay so it seems the most likely culprit has been found (thanks to other users more bot savvy than i)
basically it’s what happens when people end up giving permissions to fishy linked accounts and services like “2mblr” promising to back up their blog or give them unfollow notifications or whatever, which inadvertently gives the service permission to make posts and hijack the user’s account for bot shit. if this happens to you, it’s actually a relatively easy fix as long as you still have access to your account
essentially you just need to remove the linked service and you should have full control of your blog again. to be super safe you could also change your password after regaining control of the account, but i don’t think that should be necessary.
anyway, if you (like me) don’t have any linked 3rd party accounts, you shouldn’t have anything to worry about at the moment. if anyone you follow starts posting bot shit, try to contact them to let them know what’s happening and how to fix it. always be wary of giving your info to any 3rd party services!
