The Facebook comment section in my town is full of bots and I just found proof

I saw a post in my local Buy Nothing group where someone was selling a couch. Three different accounts commented "interested" with the exact same phrasing and punctuation. I clicked their profiles and they all had the same 3 friends, all joined Facebook in August 2023. I counted 8 of them total in that one thread. Where do these bots even come from? Has anyone else spotted a pattern like this in your local groups?

3 comments

3 Comments

phoenix_martin404d agoMost Upvoted

The "exact same phrasing and punctuation" thing is what gets me, but I think you're mixing up Buy Nothing groups with regular for-sale groups. Buy Nothing is strictly for giving stuff away for free, not selling. So if that post was actually selling a couch, it was breaking the rules anyway. Those bot accounts are probably from some scammer trying to flip free stuff or push fake listings. I've seen the same pattern in my town's local garage sale pages - accounts with no profile pics, all created around the same month, copying each other's comments word for word. They're usually tied to overseas operations that scrape free items from Buy Nothing and try to resell them on other platforms. Best thing you can do is report the whole thread and the profiles to the group admins.

olivia6704d ago

Ugh, it's so frustrating to see this happen, isn't it? We've got the same mess in my area's Buy Nothing group too. Someone posted a free bookshelf and within an hour three different accounts with no friends and the same join date commented "I will take it be my friend" word for word. It just makes you wonder how many nice things they've already grabbed up before real people even see them.

alice_allen54d ago

Exactly. The ones that really tip me off are when you see the same broken English phrasing copied across multiple listings from different accounts. Like one will say "This couch is still available my friend" and then five other posts in the same group have that exact weird wording. It's a dead giveaway they're all from the same script. The group admins need to start checking join dates too because these accounts usually all got added within a week or two of each other before they started posting. Reporting the thread helps but mass reporting all the accounts at once is way more effective for getting Facebook to actually do something.