This 'College Protester' Isn't Real. It's an AI-Powered Undercover Bot for Cops

Interesting that the fake personas are active on both reddit and 4chan, which usually are anonymous or at least pseudonymous.

The "bots are filling subreddits/image boards" has been a common conspiracy theory, usually called "dead Internet theory". Apparently it is at least partially true.

I at least vaguely get the idea of having law enforcement one-on-one message people who might be planning crimes. Well, I think it should be handled with a lot of care and documentation (I mean there’s a lot of risk of entrapment with this sort of stuff, right?), but at least it is possible that it could be done in a manner than is not a net negative.

Having a bot to help radicalize people on a public, open site like Reddit seems pretty bad, though. Isn’t it more likely to produce an environment of radicalization?