Just want to address some confusion in the comments: -- My theory is that the bots naively try this tactic on any channel regardless of if the RU-vidr is small or well known, or uses their full real name, or has blocked words. It's all automated so they are likely crawling through channels just posting everywhere. That is the strength of bots after all... brute force -- While RU-vidrs may have a set of personal "blocked words", RU-vid also has filters that can remove comments for various reasons, so a removed comment could be from either process. RU-vid also likely "fuzzes" the time the comment is made visible so you wouldn't be able to tell if the comment was blocked and then manually approved or just artificially delayed. -- If a comment has a word on the RU-vidr's "blocked words" list, it isn't automatically deleted, it goes to a queue for the RU-vidr to review and post if they decide it is not a problem. For example, if the RU-vidr's name is Jessica so she has that in the block list, but someone makes a comment like "You sound like Jessica Alba", that comment can be approved
I was going to ignore this like a solid third of my recommendations, until I saw you covered this topic in under 3 minutes. No 20 minute PyroLive slop. Thank you ma'am
@@michaeljones1686while it is a small channel, it should be important to note that every other channels that prefer privacy are also at risk with this problem. Sharing and discussing this around the net helps spread awareness than leaving it be to the algorithm to recommend it to everyone
And let's kick the few people down who try to spread awareness of inappropriate things like corn being on our platform because they're talking about corn!
FINALLY someone made a video about this!!! i noticed this happening since 2 months ago and i thought it was like someone spamming celebrities names but i tried to google them and nothing shows up. And as time went on, every time i watch a video i always go to the comment section and to "newer" to see if theyre on every video, turns out they are. Thank you so much for explaining :)
Recently D'Angelo released a video talking about how prevalent and malicious the bot problem is getting in youtube. He mentioned the "name spam" bots but yours is the first good theory about why they exist that I've seen. Great info and great channel, I just suscribed yesterday after watching the narwhal video.
my guy needs to release new music instead of analysis videos on youtube because the last one we got was a song for the soundtrack of Red Ded Redemption 2
There’s nothing you can do, I looked at my email history and it looks like every half hour, someone is trying to guess and not into my email from different countries
Don't worry. This only targets people who hides their identity, which is usually smaller creators on RU-vid, so the RU-vid staff won't fix it until a high profile high profit RU-vidr directly complains about it, even if half of RU-vid gets impacted by this.
having bots that brute-forcingly search for banned names to dox people on youtube is so dystopian to me. i still remember when the most annoying bot related issues were iPhone X scam comments back in 2017 and the "wanna be friends" comments like 4 years ago
It's amazing that we live in a time where for some reason people who have nothing interesting to do try to brute force someone's personal data using bots.
@@kulak403 Mhm, probably boredom, or for the challenge. I usually geolocate addresses. Not for any particular reason. I don’t do anything with the info because that’s just messed up. I just like the challenge and puzzle of it.
At least the solution is fairly easy and obvious: just add a bunch of random first and last names of all genders and ethnicities to fuzz up the results.
But then she'll have to comb through the comments that get caught to unblock them. Another unexpected time sink that comes with social media account ownership. it will fuzz up the results, but it will also catch unwanted stuff.
@@SOOKIE42069 If it's a really generic name it might also be used as a stand-in by someone avoiding another person's real name. For example, "I have a friend, who I'll call Luke from here on out, that did something crazy in XYZ".
Solution; don’t put any words in a blocked list. Kind of scares me that creators can censor whatever they want, when most don’t have the best of intentions 😬 Regardless, I don’t think it’s good to give someone that level of power over the discourse under their own videos, they will probably use it how they see fit.
commenting so u get pushed more. This information is so wild, and i think its a solid theory, just brute forcing it with bots makes a lot of sense, creepy af too
"Hey RU-vid can you fix your obvious security flaws?" "But people use Ad blockers and that makes me sad :(" Anyone remember when ads were banners on the bottom of a video and you found could just click X on them? I used to think they were annoying. Oh what a sweet summer child I was.
@@mega_gamer93 Let's see, there's the scam bots in the comments section that are a security risk, there's the double standards that allow ads to have more freedom, there's the dumpster fire of RU-vid Kids, their ongoing war with ad blockers despite some ads being shady (Which is why the government themselves use an ad blocker for security reasons) They act like this because they know there's no real competition in the video sharing platform world (Other than TikTok, which is mostly for short form content) so they know their creators won't be able to move to a site that 's less abusive to its users because they pay the best of the lot. Do I really need to go on?
@@EgoTheSavage RU-vid is owned by a multi billion dollar company, I'm sure they'll survive without forcing ads in people's faces. Especially with how expensive Premium is, and how many people buy Premium to escape the ads. They think destroying ad blockers will make people pay for Premium, but it'll most likely just drive people away or have them find ad blocking alternatives.
@@mega_gamer93 When people mass-report spam, RU-vid could just block the account for a year with an appeal process for content creators. A year without commenting for average commenters isn't bad. Or any of the other dozens of ways to fight spam bots
This is a quite insightful view on these bot comments - and to further support your hypothesis, I have seen some that have place-type words in the comments - like 'Estate' or 'Street' - so they could be fishing for cases where people have their own address blocked to prevent casual or accidental doxxing. Time to add some false positives to my filters!
Oof, I don’t like this. I’ve seen creators who seem to have so many blocked words you can’t even post a long enough comment without eventually hitting one of those words, and this is very benign stuff as well. This is really ridiculous and creators shouldn’t be able to censor words they don’t like just because, it’s terrible for discourse. Just let YT filter out bad words.
@@Ryan-cb1ei Creators' comments sections reflect upon them -- I can't blame anyone who just blocks some words related to a debate that always turns nasty.
@@Ryan-cb1ei I don't have a problem with it. Most of the filter terms I have added are to deal with scammers trying to sell drugs or defraud scam victims in the comments. It would be great if it all just got filtered anyway, but it's a hard problem.
This kind of small "oddity" that most people never talk about/deal with is right up my alley. And I think that's pretty smart of you to piece it together like you did. I've currently been trying to figure out why some of my comments post and others don't. (It's become like 50/50 at this point)
Thanks for all the advice J! I remember when we were in middle school in Xpujil, you were already warning people about privacy issues on the interweb. P.S. Your mom Gloria, maiden name Toarstotzka , does make excellent tomatillo pies!
Damn, this is bringing me back to when we all grew up on Larchmont St., playing with your pet, Buddy. We would all sing the My Social Security Number Is song, but it’s been so long I’ve forgotten the lyrics! Do you remember?
There's an argument to be made that the world would be a better place without RU-vid comments. In addition to some great things it's done for us, Social Media has made discourse a lot more toxic.
Honestly I wouldn't even mind. It would stop a lot of spam, and low quality comments. People would only comment on stuff if they really want to. Even just a captcha ever x amount of posts would be good.
I've been getting these comments too! But my real name is public on wikipedia. I don't see why there would be a need for this - or what they would gain from having my real name in the first place...
Might be casting a wide net on accounts with a certain sub count or higher? If they're just aggregating information then its probably easier to do that and wait for results to come in than to specifically target individuals. Could also be to target deadnames for trans people online - even if you have your name on Wikipedia you may not have a deadname on there if you were trans, so transvestigators may be using this to try and "discover" that X is trans and their deadname is Y. Also, loved your work on Chaos.
I have had so many of these types of comments appear on random videos over the past few weeks, if not months, and have wondered why. Normally I just hide the user from my channel, but your theory is very plausible. Thanks for the video!
Thanks for this video. I've been seeing those comments the past few months and I couldn't come up with an explanation for them. Also....I am just now realizing I should have not used my actual name. So there's that.
I don’t know if you’ve noticed this but around 30% of the accounts are from 2015 and seemed to have been involved in a data leak judging by how they are all made in the same year and have little to no information on the accounts. The weird thing is, some of them seem to have the original profile pictures, usually of real people, but a weird majority of them are full body pictures of women with except for their heads out view. Also all of the 2015 accounts’ banners are of major cities like NY city, Bordeaux, etc. so I can assume they were altered too
Yep you see very generic names of specifically American older women and some men. Accounts have got to be hijacked and all the data scrapped but some still have original videos like some homemade family videos at a barbeque 10+ years ago. Has to be a massive leak unless they realized generating American names and profile pictures is more trustworthy but the accounts ages are far too old for that to make sense. It's honestly super interesting.
No one's going to bring up the fact that "Jessica" was in her banned words? This whole thing would've been missed, had she not included that name. I love the weird layers this whole thing could be looked at. It also creeps me out knowing stuff like this goes unnoticed all the time...
Their real name is Jessica, they grew up on Jessica St, their mom's maiden name is Jessica and their childhood pet was Jessica the gerbil, obviously. I'd wager the last 4 of their social is 7422 even.
They use these little bits of contextual information to brute force and break into accounts. Once they find your first and last name or some variation of that, it really narrows down the accounts that have been compromised already on the web through database leaks and treasure troves of information already in the hidden market. Your YT account might not be that important, but I'd wager a significant population have a lot of accounts connected to their gmail.
Theres actually a website where u can see if your email has been involved in a database leak ( haveibeenpwned ) so theres that but other info may still be gathered without the leaks unfortunately
Well it doesn’t help that years ago youtube which is connected to google decided to have the google name show instead of the RU-vid one. It is why, in my opinion, so many people have their names listed on some channels. Also my friend was panicked realizing it switched it to her name via google.
THANK YOU for making this video short, to the point, concise, clear, with zero cringe advertising and zero pointless time fillers. Amazing content you did here.
my thought was they would spam these names and kids with same names will reply "ong that's my name" Just like those old Facebook posts that steal your birthdays and stuff by "make your rapper name" thingy
Anyone remembers the "Hey, did you know that if you write your password on the chat, it's gets automatically replaced with stars? Look: ✶✶✶✶✶" scheme? ;J
@@wallewonks I thought that was obvious to see. This is why I don't even participate in those. Those quizzes are just scraping information out of you. EX... What is the first letter of your name.....last name....month....day......... Time..year.......Car model.......lvl of education..... Dangerous stuff for a website to know........
I had already asked RU-vid support what this new wave of bots was about, but with your hypothesis I might have to bug them again until they answer. This could seriously endanger people who value their privacy.
Nice job putting in the effort in actually trying to reach out to RU-vid about this issue. Even if RU-vid just ignores us, it’s nonetheless important to bring this issue up so more people are aware.
That was my theory since a lot of the fake reply comments on those posts are by Firstname Lastname bots. I thought maybe they were posting names to try to establish some kind of history of those names being legitimate, but it didn't quite make sense how that would work.
I think those threads are my least favorite type of bot comment lol, mostly because depending on the video subject you can read 2-3 comments in before you realize it’s just a bunch of bots
From what I've heard, the bots use a random set of names and words to create a placeholder that isn't blocked by filters. Then after a few weeks they'll edit that comment for advertisements. The unique set of words allows them to find it again and it goes by (somewhat) unnoticed by creators.
I wonder what the story is behind all of the 'you need to buy this book' comments. I'm seeing them everywhere now with hundreds of likes. Very bizarre.
Seems like it would be a better idea to make something that doesn't look super spammy in that case as that's likely to be manually removed by the creator. Why not just write "Great video!" or something similar
Finally someone has a good theory for what these bot comments are for!!! They are literally on EVERY video I watch. I can finally sleep at night knowing their purpose.
I always knew something like this would happen. I'm fine with people using the name Dylan for me because it made it easier to record videos with friends, but all personal details beyond that I've kept on a tight lockdown on since about 2015 when someone straight up commented on my channel asking if I was Dylan (X) from (Y) school. I realised that something like this would happen some day though, so I did what you advised and just added a bunch of random names, schools, towns, companies, etc to the list to prevent random details getting out. Friends called me crazy. Maybe I am given I only ever hit a peak of 151 subscribers before dumping this channel, but it's better to be safe than sorry when it comes to your personal information on the internet (see: NerdCubed having a fan recognise the carpet outside his flat from 4 frames that showed it, who decided it would be a great idea to show up at the front door of his flat. Not the building itself, _his front door_ )
You can always spam your own comment section with random names yourself as a decoy ;) Then people would be none the wiser which of them is real in case someone tried to dox you.
I can’t even tell someone to stay safe because RU-vid will delete my comment, and meanwhile we get bots spamming CP and then this 💀 this platformmm bruh
I like taking jabs at RU-vid as much as the next guy, but in this case it feels like people are really underestimating how beyond infested the internet is with this stuff. Open anything thats trending on social media and there will be more phishing accounts than bacteria crawling on your phone screen. It takes such a small amount of processing power to execute this kind of behavior from the users end, you can send out millions of these things and a 1 in 5 million chance of the desired effect would still be worth it. RU-vid would make a bigger impact ordering its employees to step outside and kill every mosquito they can find with their bare hands than try to get rid of as many bots as they can. There will always be people looking for exploits. The best thing anyone can do is what this lady is already doing- inform people!!! Taking care of your devices, personal info, and staying updated is leagues better than what any company or security software can do. Congrats with the algorithm btw 🎉
They don't give shit about much worse stuff, involving children. I mean, they do care to ban _you_ if you dare to raise awareness about it, but they never give a shit about the actual wrongdoers :q
@bonbonpony keep in mind you're dealing with a shitton of algorithms before it even graces the screen of a traumatized content moderator who's already overworked (many documentaries on this phenomenon)
I think I put blocked first and last names together as a single word, rather than separately. So instead of blocking “John” and “Smith” I blocked “John Smith”. That way people can talk about any John or Smith separately as long as they don’t put 2 and 2 together. Well, not “John Smith” specifically that’s just an example.
This has been constantly happening to me as well! I get these comments like 10 times per day. Also RU-vidr Dolan Dark talked about this as well a few days ago. It seems to be getting spammed all over RU-vid
Interesting. I was only familiar with those spam bots looking to lure people onto their profile to get them to a different site and squeeze some money out of them. They've gotten really good at hiding, reposting real users comments, voting their own stolen comments up with bot likes. And it seems to work. I often see people engaging with their comments, not realizing they're talking to a bot.
This is fascinating. Ive recently noticed a couple of comments I made didnt appear which which I thought was really weird. That you explained channels can have a blocked work list was enlightening to me. Thanks for this video. Its quite the rabbit hole
Give it a few years and the vast majority of comments will be nothing but bots spamming names and addresses, with crypto bots responding with inane "financial advice".
I imagine this mainly targets small or new accounts that haven't yet enabled extra security (ie. 2FA) to log into RU-vid. Big creators' real names are normally public already, but they're careful about security.
I saw some of these comments and was thinking that a bot was trying to write names for accounts but someone had programmed it wrong and the names became comments. This makes more sense.
I've seen these comments in a few of my RU-vid friend's videos. Their theories were that these comments will be edited later with scams and whatnot after you ignore them. Then the creator will not get a notification that a new spam comment has been made .
FINALLY, thank you for figuring this out, or at least having a good hypothesis! But, what about those accounts that post odd, incoherent phrases? I haven't seen some in a while, but I remember their format being something like "Blabla bloobloo. Jongba, tingy toonga." (NOT WITH THOSE WORDS THO LOL, just random nouns and adjectives.)
@@HGModernismCould be probing the site-wide filter system to see if they can suss out how to evade it. I haven't seen the sort of comments HueManatee mentioned though.
When I first saw these on one video I watched, I thought it was just some kid typing random names on his ipad. I had no idea this was a whole network of bots trying to dox people. That's scary.
Holy crap I accidentally clicked on the timestamp you did and it turned out I was exactly at the same place it just repeated the exact same thing not the quarter of a second before😂
Woah, what's up Skye Palmer? Skye from your middle name Skylar, right? I saw you at work at 120 Eglington Business Centre Inc! I remember you because your blue Toyota Corolla had the licesnse plase BTAE917, 9/17 like your birthday. So cool to see you!
Oh joy. Thanks for this. I'll consider adding some noise to the block list and spread the word to my RU-vid friends. I was originally here because I've been trying to figure out another suspected bot related pattern: They post random quotes, presumably to build up their reputation so they aren't deleted as quickly when they start scamming. Looks like you noticed it before me.
It was very strange when I got one. Most of my comments for my youtube vids are set to "Strict" for the past several months as I've been on hiatus, and so several of these comments were held for review, and there were several accounts typing similar things, just random name strings too. Obvs, I removed/did not allow it but it was kind of creepy--I also had one comment where someone (I guess a bot) for some reason, found my old myspace's about me section that I've not read/seen with my own eyes for 17 years and that spooked me since it was definitely a throwback, but extremely creepy.
