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this post was submitted on 21 Sep 2025
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What is the purpose of using phones for this? Is it easier to make it look like the devices are unique if you actually use physical devices? I just always imagined that bot farms would be run on large servers, not phones.
Might be cheaper to buy old broken ewaste phones?
Also, they don’t use a lot of power.
Oh man, it'd be easy to hack a farm like this if they are using old phones.
Aren't there some social media services that are only accessible through an official mobile app now? I honestly don't know; this is the only one I use.
Although, to OP's point, I suppose emulation would be more efficient.
Used phones have actual human usage history associated with their hardware identifiers. If you were to use emulated devices with spoofed identifiers, it would be easier for the large social media services to filter out the bot traffic.
Using old devices that were once used by real people leaves a digital paper trail that makes it harder to make algorithms to filter out bots.
It is actually incredibly hard to create a perfect emulated environment that cannot be detected by the software running within it, in this case the official social media app the bots have to use. The apps of the social media platforms cannot really be fooled by an emulated environment. There are too many ways for it to check whether it is running on hardware or in a virtual machine or container.
Case in point ask anyone who has ever tried to use a graphics driver with windows in a virtual machine.
Nothing porksnort said implied social media wanted total elimination of the bot networks. The methods listed are accurate ways they will stop unwanted traffic.
Like half the population of this site exists because Reddit locked down their API. It's an empirical fact that they engage in bot detection and prevention. Anyone who consistently uses a VPN will have personal experience with it. Anyone who's tried to interact with a social media's API can tell you that. Try to write a bot that scrapes Facebook events or LinkedIn profiles before you speak in such absolutes.
You are correct that they don't aim to completely eliminate them. They might even explicitly allow some of them. But If they didn't engage in any bot management you'd see nothing but spam for "hot 21yos in your area" on every site. Depending on the platform they might offer paid API access to facilitate those influence networks (eg X.com blue checks). Even if they did that they'd engage in bot prevention for bots that aren't paying.
Yeah they absolutely have a motive to get rid of some kinds of bots: spam
I’m not assuming any of that. The social media companies do monitor for bots and influence operations. Just because they let some keep operating doesn’t change the technical reason for using actual phones vs emulators.
It is both cat and mouse AND kabuki theater.
From a technical view I'd think it's the SIM cards. You register and authenicate basically everthing via mobile number. If you want your bots to look like real people to the automated gatekeepers you better have a legitimate number and connect via cellular
No way they're all using wireless in that small of a space, even if it's a mix of cellular and Wi-Fi. I'm betting the USB cable is supplying power and a LAN connection. Which makes me wonder if sites could look for cellphone devices using a wired connection as a dragnet to round up troll networks.