So the 'dead internet theory' is a fascinating theory where bots have taken over the internet. Having most of the interactions happening by bots that talk between each other instead of real people. So imagine a robot selling another robot who also wants to sell, so they go back and forth with their spam filling out the groups.
A version can be seen on abandoned groups where there are no longer human users and automate bots fill the group with advertising some sex pill or some shady site or casino.
However, this is even more shocking when you experience in your own 'active' community and nobody seems to notice they are in the middle of it.
This is what happened with the @hiveblockchain group on Telegram. For a few months now, there seems to be random new users coming into the group and complaining that they can't get their funds out. However, these are secret bots that then get replied by other bots who ask them to DM so they can help them with their situation.
This build the illusion all these scam bots are driving major liquidity from real Hive users and stealing their coins. However is all part of the facade. What really threw me off is that after confronting and admin to do something about it. He seemed to defend the 'victim' and deny any proof that he was getting tricked by the same play.
I decided to do some digging and found out the following thing of the so called victims:
They aren't users of the group, a simple search shown no previous messages by those victims.
Their Hive accounts are highly suspicious, they have all the trait of a auto-generated account, when they provided information on the transaction you could see their accounts were pretty random number.
No real Hive users, Hive is a blogging platform and no recent blogs make any reference to such scam. You will think that a real user of a blogging platform will write about such situation.
No other Hive group has this problem, other Hive channels go by without a mention of these 'bot scams'.
These seems to be quite critical points that can be, easily verified and only a fool will perceive this dance as organic. So I decided to go into AI and asked for some code to show how to fix this. Look for a blacklist of phrases and keywords and be able to catch and flag these messages. Then delete their messages from the group and send them a DM with the instruction of the issue, and pinned message.
This will help clear the group with the spam and at the same time help the victim. Although I most say this will also fail as these bots will just make more posts without the keyword list and will become a cat and mouse situation. I'll still will post the following code and see if you can annotate it. Maybe add a whitelist for admin users and other long time contributors.
import telebotbot = telebot.TeleBot("YOUR_BOT_TOKEN") keywords = ["transaction held", "frozen", "not seeing balance"]
@bot.message_handler(func=lambda message: any(keyword in message.text.lower() for keyword in keywords)) def handle_bad_message(message): try: bot.ban_chat_member(message.chat.id, message.from_user.id) bot.send_message(message.from_user.id, "Your message was flagged. Please contact support for help.") except Exception as e: print(e)
bot.polling()