Lead Balloon Ep. 59 - Bot Farms Have Made Social Media Engagement Metrics Meaningless, with Eric Schwartzman

If anyone can spoof the algorithm, does that mean everyone has to?

What you see online is not real.

This has long been a reliable axiom for information consumption on the internet.

But social media and SEO marketers have long relied on their engagement metrics as an exception to that rule—critical quantitative data that can't be faked and can be leveraged to demonstrate the value of a campaign or piece of content.

Except in 2025, it's just not reliable any more.

(A.I. rendering of a bot farm, based on purported video of an actual bot farm in action)

That is because sophisticated operations called "bot farms" have built swarms of networked smart phones designed to mimic the organic engagement that drives social media algorithms.

At a command, these bot farms can create a cascade of authentic-seeming engagement that's nearly indistinguishable from the real thing, catapulting selected posts to the top of social media feeds.

International state actors can wage propaganda wars.

Financial influencers can pump up the value of assets they hold.

And, more and more, global brands can leverage bot activity to drive their messaging to the top of feeds, manufacture social proof, and astro-turf the impression of favorability.

So in this episode, we're talking to ⁠digital PR expert Eric Schwartzman⁠, whose firm helps clients with brand management, reputation monitoring, crisis management, and corporate communications.

He also recently published an ⁠expose for Fast Company⁠ on the rise of bot farms and its implications.

Together, we'll learn how bot farmers manipulate the algorithm, what means are available to detect inauthentic activity, and why social media networks are slow to react.

Plus, we'll explore the moral quandary that social media and SEO marketers increasingly face in this brave new world:

If everyone else is using bots to drive engagement... should you?

Transcript:

Dusty Weis

Social media shape the reality of the world we live in, for most folks. And what people see on social media, more and more, is being selected by computerized algorithms.

These algorithms monitor how people react to the things they see, and if they seem to find it interesting, it shows those things to more people.

In a sort of naive way, it was designed to be a perfectly democratic system, one that allows the best ideas or stories to rise to the top and get the most exposure.

At least that's the way that it's supposed to work.

But as social media companies have chosen to inject more of their algorithm into what users see or don't see, they have created a set of rules. And increasingly, those rules are being manipulated by so-called bot farms.

Eric Schwartzman

They spoof the algorithm into thinking something's popular, when in fact it's just a bunch of bot activity.

So it's like a digital puppet show that the audience doesn't realize they're watching.

Dusty Weis

Digital public relations expert Eric Schwartzman has been tracking a precipitous rise in social media manipulation through the use of bot farms. And he says, more than ever before, it's leading to a digital world in which nothing is what it seems, social proof is easily manufactured, and social media strategists face a real moral quandary.

I'm Dusty Weis. From Podcamp Media, this is Lead Balloon, a podcast about irresistible tales from the worlds of PR, marketing and branding, told by the well-meaning communications professionals who live them.

Thank you for tuning in. Our guest today is a digital PR practitioner, a content marketing strategist, and an author with more than 30 years of experience in the field. He's the founder of the firm Schwartzman and Associates, having worked for clients including IBM, Boeing, Johnson and Johnson, the US Department of State and Lucasfilm. And his recent article for Fast Company is making waves with the headline, “Bot Farms Invade Social Media to Hijack Popular Sentiment.”

Eric Schwartzman, thank you so much for joining us here on Lead Balloon.

Eric Schwartzman

Thanks for having me, Dusty.

Dusty Weis

So, Eric, in the fields of social media marketing, SEO, we live and die by our engagement metrics. They are the numbers by which we demonstrate value to our clients and employers. In podcasting and streaming, they are the numbers that determine how much revenue creators earn. As technology has evolved, they have made other forms of campaign measurement obsolete in the eyes of many folks.

And I know that this was not your purpose in writing it, but in your new article, you demonstrate that these numbers are not only utterly malleable, but sometimes they are verging on outright hooey. The cause of that is bot farms. So what is a bot farm? Broad strokes? And how are they being used to manipulate our understanding of the internet?

Eric Schwartzman

Sure. Sure. So imagine like a room filled with smartphone phones, all orchestrated to mimic human behavior online. These are typically older phones being recycled to run fake traffic to social networks. They're used to flood targeted posts with likes, shares, and comments to create the illusion of popularity or consensus. It's like a digital puppet show that the audience doesn't realize they're watching.

So in my work, I help clients see through these facades so they can tell fake from genuine engagement.

Dusty Weis

Now you say a room filled with smartphones, and I think people picture different things. But I saw some of the video that you posted with this. You're talking about literal racks and racks and racks of dozens of smartphones, hundreds of smartphones?

Eric Schwartzman

Well, I mean, we no one knows how big some of these state sponsored farms could be. We've seen images of commercial bot farms coming out of Southeast Asia. But I mean, picture like a data center where there are racks and racks, but instead of servers on the racks, there are cell phones on the racks. The cell phones are cabled to USB hubs.

The hubs are cabled to a centralized computer that then orchestrates activity, likes, comments, posts on the same story in a short period of time because the social networks decide what to show you based on engagement rate. These are amplification based engagement algorithms. And so what they do is they spoof the algorithm into thinking something's popular, when in fact it's just a bunch of bot activity.

Dusty Weis

Now, Eric, this is not what I would say is a high water mark in the history of truth and our understanding of the world. Certainly there are a lot of things going on in the world right now where you can look at it and say, well, we're not doing so great on that. But the network infrastructure, the programing that it must take to orchestrate this, not just that, but the hardware and the personnel.

There's got to be an easier way to lie to people. What's the motivation here? And who's running these bot farms?

Eric Schwartzman

Well, I mean, the motivation is, you know, major foreign policy initiatives, wars, geopolitical alliances. I mean, it doesn't get any bigger. You can look at an initiative like Brexit where, England decided or the UK decided not to join the EU. That was largely a bot driven initiative. Also, because we are so evenly divided politically in the US right now.

You know, a swing of a few points makes the difference in a presidential election. And certainly, you know, there are bot farms from China, Russia and Iran lining up behind candidates that they think are more predisposed to their ends and aims. So, I mean, the stakes could not be higher. And it's also true in the world of commercial products and marketing and advertising, where people are trying to make markets for new brands and people are deciding what brands to buy based on how they're trending online.

And so if you can just manufacture those trends, you can actually trigger organic trends with bot activity. So the bot activity is almost become table stakes in some of these arenas just to get seen in the newsfeed.

Dusty Weis

To take this back home for a moment, because we're talking about very, very big things, nation states and the like.

But I had an experience just the other week, where my wife ordered something off of Amazon, and it came out of the box in a number of pieces, and it was certainly not the quality that we had anticipated and getting when she ordered it.

And she said to me, but it had a 4.8 out of five stars and thousands of reviews on Amazon, and I had to pull her aside and say, “Hon, these numbers that you see, these star ratings, those aren't real anymore. Those are manufactured.”

And so for you to come forward with this article when you did, I think is very, very timely because I still think that there is not a great understanding out there among the general populace.

Is it really possible to move the needle that much on an issue of public opinion, just by spamming likes and comments on to a particular post? Are we really that simple psychologically?

Eric Schwartzman

So there's a recent meme that's been trending on TikTok and Instagram that shows sort of overweight Americans in factories assembling cars or making shoes. I don't know if you've seen them.

Dusty Weis

Oh, I've seen it.

Eric Schwartzman

Those have been traced back to the Communist Party of China. And so fake engagement or something like that is a great way for them to sort of get underneath any support for tariffs that there might be in this country right now. This is happening at all levels. And the crazy thing is, it's not even about the lie or the misinformation anymore.

It's about the engagement that's targeted on that lie. It’s about amplifying that lie. So you don't even have to tell the lie yourself. All you have to do is find someone else that's telling the lie, and target that post for engagement and send it viral. And then they become your puppets or your actors. So it's incredibly sophisticated.

And I think it's underneath popular opinion in almost every circle right now.

Dusty Weis

Now bots are nothing new. I mean, those of us who have been around the internet for 20, 25 years can remember the good old days of bots crawling across GeoCities pages. But how is this newest generation different from the previous iterations that we've seen?

Eric Schwartzman

So bots used to be these clunky scripts that were sort of easy to spot and ignore. They basically exploited APIs. But today's bots are more sophisticated because they use real mobile phones. If you're talking to a mobile phone, I mean, as long as you can't tell that it's a computer that's generating the responses, there's no way to tell that it's an engagement with a bot versus a person, because the information being sent, the technical information being sent to the social network from the phone, is just the same as the technical information that would be sent from a phone in your or my hands.

So there's absolutely no way to tell. It's kind of like the difference between Pac-Man and Call of Duty. I mean, it's literally that stark, that severe. So, for clients, you know, this means traditional detection methods aren't good enough anymore. You actually need specialized advanced analysis tools and processes to discern fake from real activity.

Dusty Weis

Well, so okay, so instead of having one centralized processor and server that's manufacturing all of this engagement from one machine, and is fairly easy to pick out. They've got these racks and racks and racks of phones. But isn't there location tracing that goes into that as well? What workarounds have they developed for that?

Eric Schwartzman

Look, I'm going to be kind of vague intentionally because I'm not trying to help anyone build a monster here. But, you know, there is a process known as geolocation spoofing. And that's typically the process that's used to fake out the location where it's coming from. And then there are other things that you can do there, like signatures. Like you have to make sure that the phone is set to English and that the time zone is set to the time zone that they're spoofing, that the activity is coming from waking hours in that time zone.

So all those things are thought of and aligned. And you can imagine when you introduce an operating system that uses AI, mass engagement, deceptive tactics.

Dusty Weis

So who's running these bot farms then? I mean, the motivation seems pretty simple. I would imagine that there's a lot of money to be made doing this, but who's running them? And how do these operations find paying customers?

Eric Schwartzman

So they range from state sponsored groups who are aiming to, you know, sway public opinion as we talked and really divide Western audiences. They're just looking for any way to get like U.S. audiences fighting against U.S. audiences. And then there's also these shady marketers who are looking to either inflate engagement metrics or earn ad revenue with bot views and clicks.

And the goals vary. Some want to disrupt, others wanted to see for profit. And clients you know are totally unaware of it right now. They're literally hemorrhaging marketing dollars, getting nothing in return. So really identifying the digital threats and developing strategies to mitigate them has become like a job like digital threat detection is now my main job. And so in terms of identifying who they are, I mean, just go on to Fiverr and search, social media growth, social media growth tactics.

Facebook followers. It started with Facebook followers and Instagram followers where you basically pay for a follower, get a follower. It's now advanced in sophistication to these coordinated engagement campaigns. It's not enough to just throw a bunch of likes on a post. You've got to throw likes on it. You've got to throw comments on it. People have to comment on the comments and like the likes they have to repost it.

They have to view it. They have to expand the profile. Right? Because the social network is looking at all that activity in relationship to each other in a in a span of time to see if it's authentic or not. And so it's really the coordinated ad engagement and the introduction of AI for comments based on personas. That's made it almost impossible to detect at this point.

Dusty Weis

I feel like we're also just careening down this highway toward this point of disinformation singularity, where, yes, we've got the bot farms, but this is also being spurred on by the rise in availability of artificial intelligence tools, the AI that's out there. Because it used to be that if someone was astroturfing engagement by posting comments, it would be the same five comments copy and pasted over and over again.

And now you can go to ChatGPT and say generate for me 1000 different positive sounding engagement comments that I can leave on a social post about football.

Eric Schwartzman

Well, it's more than that. First of all, the original type of comment that you are referring to, we call copypasta... just the same thing over and over again. It's very easy to detect, but what's happening now is the bot operators will create personas, so they'll create a Facebook or Instagram or TikTok account. They'll give it a profile picture and a bio, and they'll give it some interests.

And then what they'll do is they'll actually go into a community like Formula One racing or Black Lives Matter or K-pop, and they'll actually build a following and find their place in that community by discussing topics that have nothing to do with what they're trying to promote inside that community, so they can gain trust or engagement. These bots. And they'll set up some simple workflows that are repetitive.

But because the content is always changing, it's difficult to see that those are actually repetitive, bot driven activities. And then once they've got trust and they've got a community and they've got followers and they've been around for some time, maybe even a year, then the bots will wake up and be activated for a certain type of purpose.

Now, if it's Formula One, you know, that might align really well with conservative values.

So if you're a conservative politician and you were going to use this type of nefarious tactic to promote yourself, you might build your bots in a formula one community. If you were a liberal politician, you might go to K-pop or Black Lives Matter. And this is exactly what we're seeing. We're seeing this in research. These are things that I saw and I found that I wrote about in my Fast Company article.

Dusty Weis

One of the things that I found so fascinating was how these tactics have been used beyond just this notion of the politics or swaying opinion, but for actual financial gain. People have used these tactics to manipulate financial markets, so-called pump and dump with penny stocks or cryptocurrency or issues like that. How does that work?

Eric Schwartzman

Oh, that's happening daily. Millions of dollars are being made daily through these pump and dump schemes. And if you've never heard of a pump and dump scheme, the interesting thing, and I found this out when I was researching the story. You know, one of the first pump and dump schemes was by Joseph Kennedy, the father of JFK. And what he did was you got a bunch of rich investors to start buying up shares of RCA.

RCA was a company that made video cameras and some of the first TVs, and they were like the hot tech stock in the early 1900s. And what they did is, you know, they sort of created this impression that there was more demand for the stock than there actually was by buying up big blocks of shares and by sort of whispering to folks in the media and through PR, mainstream media that this was a hot stock, they pumped it up to astronomical levels and then they all sold it.

The stock collapsed. All the little guys, they lost everything because, you know, they just had a few bucks in it. And that was that type of activity that led to the great stock market crash. So now what's happening is there are these thinly traded stocks. That means, you know, there's not a lot of volume, not a lot of people buying and selling the stock.

These aren't, you know, Tesla or Bank of America or Disney. These aren't blue chip stocks. These are small little stocks you’ve never heard of where, you know, the purchase of $30,000 worth of the stock in one day might send it up two cents. Right? Pennies. We're talking about scalping a little margin off these trades. And the way it works is these so-called financial influencers or “finfluencers,” they'll buy a thinly traded stock, they'll get on to social media with their network and with their bots, and they'll say, hey, man, this thing's going through the roof.

Sell out of your 401 K and buy some of this today. Don't miss out. And they'll basically use FOMO, fear of missing out, to get people to buy the stock. They're basically trying to drive it up a nickel or a dime so they can sell it. And this is happening daily. It may just seem like a nickel, a dime a share.

But if you own 20,000 shares, that adds up. That's happening daily. Now there are usually, you know, 4 or 5 stocks a day that are being driven up where it can be traced back exclusively to social media activity, exclusively to sentiment. There's no material information, there's no analysts rating, there's no press release, there's no earnings announcement, nothing. It's just going off of pure sentiment or speculation.

And so, in these pump and dump schemes, sometimes there'll be lawsuits. And recently a group called the Goblin Group was hauled into court for these pump and dump schemes. And ultimately the judge said no, no harm, no foul. Expressing excitement and enthusiasm for a stock, even if it is wrong, does not meet the threshold of securities fraud, at least not for now.

So pump and dump is legal, technically, until it's not. And of course, that's another thing that I help clients with, is trying to distinguish the noise from the truth when it comes to investments. And there are tools for using it. Now, there's actually a platform. I mentioned it in the story, called the Chatter Flow, which is a platform exclusively for looking at the markets and identifying, hey, what are people talking about today?

That can't be linked to any material information? And then is that legit? Is it going to pump? Is it not going to pump?

Dusty Weis

So it's essentially cross-referencing your sources, sort of like following the links from a Wikipedia article back to see where this sentiment is actually coming from.

Eric Schwartzman

Yeah, exactly. It's a great analysis. I mean, is it back ended by some material information? And if it's not, that's what Chatter Flow will surface. And they're surfacing about ten stocks a day, and about 2 to 4 of those stocks are rising each day. So it's become popular with day traders to identify those stocks for which there is pure sentiment and no material or technical information driving that sentiment.

Dusty Weis

I've got to say, Eric, it's encouraging to hear that there is something out there that can help people push back against this kind of misinformation, because the flood of misinformation just seems so much bigger than any efforts to combat it. And while the problem is getting worse, you note in your reporting that most social media companies are pulling back on their efforts to combat misinformation.

Why?

Eric Schwartzman

Well, so social media networks make money based on how many and how long people use their platform. And so this type of activity does lead to longer session times. And so you could say they're complicit or you could say they're just choosing to ignore it because they're making money off it. But I mean either way the result is that there is a lot of misinformation on there.

You know, there's actually a law which says that the social networks can't be can't be held liable for content that's distributed on their networks. They sort of were looked at originally by Congress as a copy machine, a Xerox machine. You can't sue the Xerox machine company because somebody copied misinformation on it. That's the people who used it.

The thing is, you know, when that law was made, we were seeing content newsfeeds based on reverse chronological order. Whichever was most current was what we saw on top. But once they introduced these amplification based algorithms, they actually, in my opinion, got into the business of programing because now they're actually deciding what we see based on engagement.

So I think they actually should be regulated just like, broadcast, TV and radio is regulated and cable is regulated because I would say the internet has an unfair advantage over broadcast and cable right now.

Dusty Weis

I think you raise a really great point, and I would love to see that brought up in a test case. I also think, given the current regulatory climate, it's probably highly unlikely. But, you never know. As it always has been, it's buyer beware when it comes to information that you get off of the internet and check your sources, and certainly don't cash out your entire 401 K to dump it into a stock that somebody hyped up on Twitter.

But is there a particular demographic that is more resistant to these tactics? Digital natives? Maybe they've come up with these social media feeds and so they think about them more critically? Or are we all equally vulnerable here?

Eric Schwartzman

I don't think you can silo it to any demographic. I think it's all demographics. I think, if there is one thing that might be a bar, it would be intellect, IQ. I think there are people who are easily deceived in all demos.

Dusty Weis

Yeah, yeah. Well, keep an eye on your loved ones then and just ask them, yeah. It's just it's tough. We're in a tough spot right now. As a society, we’re utterly unprepared to deal with these new technologies as they emerge. And it's hard to have a conversation with someone who lives in an information echo chamber and isn't able to think critically about that.

But as marketing strategists, as PR practitioners, we also have a job to do. And so I did want to touch on what this means for us in the digital marketing space right now. Should we still be tying our work back to digital metrics? I mean, it's at least still more reliable than the Arbitrons, right?

Eric Schwartzman

Well, look, I mean, in in paid media, you know, they've started to look at return on ad spend and that at least gets the bank account involved, you know, the deposits involved.

So I think, if you're looking at that, it's no longer a pure vanity metric. I mean you're actually looking at what you're getting back from it.

I can tell you, I've had clients in e-commerce who have added AI chat bots to their platform to try to increase engagement and sales. And in one case, you know, the chat bot was not very good. I mean, it gave a lot of bad information, particularly around logistics, particularly around critical thinking, you know, hey, can I get it by this date?

If I order in advance? It was always wrong. And we were kind of worried. Hey, you know, should we be using this thing? But we left it up. And you know what? Conversions have doubled since we've done it, so. I mean, and then in terms of, like, social, I mean, look, what are you going to say? I'm not going to go on social.

I mean, that's kind of stupid. That's like saying, you know, we're the U.S. and we don't agree with what people are doing in a certain country. So we're not going to have an embassy there. Well, that would be kind of stupid, right? Because there are people all around the world who have resources and needs. And if we get out of those markets because we don't agree with them on one thing or because they're doing something we don't like, we’re cutting off our nose to spite our face.

So I think if you're in business today and you're not using social media to get mindshare, you know you're blowing it. And yeah, there's a lot of foul play there, but you need to do some digital threat intelligence just so you know you're spending your money in the right place. And in some cases, you know, you may have to play the game too.

I mean, if you find that all your competitors are using bots and you're out, you can't even get seen. Well, I mean, then you might have to consider how you're going to get there and maybe you'll have to fight fire with fire. You know, that's your personal choice.

Dusty Weis

I have a really, really hard time with that, just from the standpoint of, at the end of the day, as PR practitioners, our integrity is the first and last thing that we have to sell. It's what our clients count on. And certainly I think that there are less reputable PR practitioners, who might run out into this space and let's say, take a contract for social media marketing for a client and turn around and pump that up by paying a bot army to like and comment on the posts that they do.

Don't we have an imperative as PR practitioners to maintain the integrity of our work for the trust of our clients?

Eric Schwartzman

Look, I'm not condoning the use of bot farms, okay? But in response to that question, you know, don't we have a responsibility honestly? I mean, I can remember having that conversation in different times throughout my career. And at the end of the day, the job of a public relations person is to protect and promote the reputation of their client.

It's not to tell them what how they should behave and what they should do. It's to present an image to the public that is favorable. And I mean, that's the truth at the end of the day. And we can say, oh, we are on a moral high horse and it's our job to be... you know, our job is to basically help the CEO or the CMO achieve their objectives.

And hopefully we can do it in a way that's responsible and ethical. I think, you know, that's what most of us would like to do, but it doesn't always go down that way.

Dusty Weis

So you're saying that the informed consent of the client is still a necessary and critical part of leveraging social media tactics?

Eric Schwartzman

Oh, the client's got to call the shots. I'm not saying anybody would ever do anything like this without the client's knowledge, but, I can tell you in some e-commerce markets it is so rampant. It is being done by the biggest brands. And if if you're not doing it, you're not going to get seen in that channel.

Now, there could be other ways. You may say, I'm not going to do that. I'm going to go mainstream media. I'm going to go events, I'm going to go direct mail. You know, I'm going to go direct sales, I'm going to go channel partners. There's a lot of ways to go. But if the objective is to get seen in social media and all your competitors are buying bot traffic, you're probably not going to get seen unless you buy bot traffic.

Dusty Weis

You're going to get drowned out. Yeah. That's wild. It must have been really wild for you as a PR practitioner reporting on this story. It's been a while since I got to put my reporter hat on. I always love it when I have the opportunities to do it. But what was it like for you reporting on this story and what was your process?

Eric Schwartzman

So first of all, I'm continually reporting. I do it to keep my juices flowing, to stay knowledgeable about things just because I'm curious. This was a fascinating story. This story first occurred to me a year ago, and I found one case study that sort of showed me this must be happening. And it took me probably 3 or 4 months to network through to someone in that case study.

And that led to more people. And that led to a conference and that led to more people. And it literally took me a year in of reporting to write this story. And then I had to wait another month to get it published. One of my friends, who was a the editor of a big computer magazine, said to me, welcome to the world of investigative reporting.

I'm sure you had a great time, but you're not making any money at it. And it's true. I mean, you certainly don't make a lot of money with investigative reporting. But I do feel like, by contributing knowledge to the community, it does come back to you in other ways through speaking gigs, through engagements with clients, through new business opportunities.

And most importantly for me, discovering what's out there, which is why I, honestly, like what I do so much is because it's always something new. You're always learning something new, you're always talking to interesting people and that's what excites me most about my job.

Dusty Weis

Well, in fact, you noted on LinkedIn that you have so much information that you've amassed over the last year here that you're even thinking about writing a book on this topic. Now, for the folks who want to follow along with your work, check out the books that you already have published and the one that is hopefully coming out soon...

Where can they learn more about you and how should we follow along?

Eric Schwartzman

So if you go to EricSchwartzman.com and go to the resources section, you can actually download a free copy of one of my books, as a PDF. And you can also sign up for notifications for when “Invasion of the Bot Farms” comes out, which I'm working on, which also covers skullduggery in the influencer community because it's being done to make and break influencers.

And it's also been done in the advertising community! There’s just a ton of ad fraud out there. I think probably as much in the programmatic world as 90% of paid impressions is bot or bot impressions.

Dusty Weis

It's wild. It's hard to believe sometimes that this is the world that we're working in. But you're right. In order to keep up, you have to continuously change and adapt and stay at the forefront of these new and emerging technologies as they happen. And certainly your article and your work in this field has been a great way to do that.

Also, I'm going to have to check the archives here, but I'm pretty sure that in 59 episodes of Lead Balloon... and I'm shocked to say it... that may be the first time that the word skullduggery has been mentioned.

So Eric Schwartzman, the founder of Schwartzman and Associates, thank you so much. It's been a blast. Thank you for joining us here on Lead Balloon.

Eric Schwartzman

Thanks for having me.

Dusty Weis

And thank you for tuning in. Here on Lead Balloon, I like to tell folks that we're like Freakonomics for PR and Marketing professionals. Or at least I keep saying that in the hope that it'll stick. So we hope to see you back here in this feed again sometime soon. Follow us on your favorite podcast app, or check out our YouTube feed.

Lead Balloon is produced by Podcamp Media, where we provide branded podcast production solutions for businesses. Our podcast studios are located in the heart of beautiful downtown Milwaukee, Wisconsin. We work with brands all over North America to help them launch and build podcasts that work. Check out our website, PodcampMedia.com.

Music for this episode by Neon Beach.

And until the next time, folks, thanks for listening. I'm Dusty Weis.