Pornbots & Bluechecks

⚬ 2022
⚬ Notes App Intimations

I have trouble feeling like a real person, whether offline or online. I suspected that the swarm of pornbots viewing my Instagram stories felt the same way. When an account named “hotbaby23 😈” liked one of my posts, with a bio that read “DON’T LOOK AT MY STORY if you don’t want to MASTURBATE!” followed by a shortened Linktree URL, I followed the trail. I wanted to know her.

Pornbots are devices of the romance-exploitation economy known as “eWhoring.” EWhores are often men masquerading as accounts belonging to young women on various digital platforms but it is mostly Instagram right now. Their success lies in a monetization model akin to that of legitimate influencers: affiliate marketing. Just as influencers earn commissions from affiliate links for cosmetics and energy drinks, pornbot accounts generate revenue by directing traffic to pornographic sites on a pay-per-lead (PPL) or pay-per-sale (PPS) basis, regardless of whether users ultimately spend money. Using third-party automated systems, eWhores scatter likes, comments, and follows across the app to mimic authentic digital gestures and lure users to their profiles carrying links to adult content—an industry making up a substantial fraction of global Internet traffic. Some of these subscription platforms offer real material, while others peddle non-existent content; the path of choice depends on the eWhore's desired investment and payout. Just clicking a link is the first-level payout from adult affiliate marketing websites. Pennies on the dollar but it adds up. The research division at Tenable, a cybersecurity company, reports each link averages 285 clicks, with some reaching 1000 clicks. The second-level payout is data collection; user registrations can earn $2 to $5 per lead for eWhores. Once an email address lands on their list, it can be sold and resold. The third-level payout is when users enter their credit card information to surpass paywalled saccharine pleasures. Direct messaging operates similarly to affiliate links at first, but they can evolve into prolonged one-on-one interactions complete with promises of love, lust, and PayPal transfers: this fourth-level payout is the most lucrative. Cybercrime researcher Alice Hutchings found that the average net per account is $774 while some have amassed over $20,000.

An early cursory glance at Reddit threads revealed rampant speculation about these accounts; on r/creepyPMs, user @Copernicus111 aptly asks: “Why do you think it’s a bot and not a real person?” EWhoring is fueled by a robust underground community—across nearly 4,000 threads, as Hutchings discovered—through which scammers trade in illicitly obtained images, videos, and tutorials. These "image packs," priced between $5 and $50, are ripped from adult content platforms, the social media profiles of ordinary individuals, and the insidious depths of “revenge porn” sites. Each image pack equals one woman. Consent is a nonentity in this exchange, leading to the inevitable fallout once the real woman is identified: lost jobs, fractured relationships, and the erosion of bodily autonomy. The sellers either meticulously replicate the identities of the women in these images—down to names, personalities, and backstories—or fabricate them entirely. Neither outcome is palatable, but both are deemed necessary; not to construct a Real Woman, but to convincingly assert she is not not. On Instagram, fake users and real users operate at a ratio of 1 to 10 which amounts to tens of millions of counterfeit identities; the former is often in service of validating the latter by way of purchasable followers to meet verification (”blue check”) thresholds. In their periodic Sisyphean purges of bots and inactive accounts, real accounts that have not violated content policies are culled in collateral while eWhores continue to thrive. These accounts operate on a rapid churn and burn basis: getting caught is merely a temporary obstacle since eWhores manage multiple accounts simultaneously and create new ones as old ones are shut down, often using the same image pack. If you have noticed pornbots becoming less obvious in their sexual overtures—usernames less forward, bios less vulgar, and comments more random—it is because they have evolved alongside detection mechanisms. These tactics include spacing text in bio with periods, nesting explicit accounts within non-explicit intermediary accounts, using literary quotations in image captions to mask backdoor DM-sliding, sequencing irregular response rates to mimic human interaction, and short URLs that mask their true destinations by leading users through a maze of websites; each redirection offering a layer of protection against spam filters. This map tracing the eWhore’s path is already dated. With each update, there are new forks. Between pornbots (increasingly “real”) and bluechecks (increasingly “fake”)—neither paying that much attention to anything at all—there becomes a net zero of what we love to call “authenticity.”

In all honesty, I do not know what to do with all this. It was during an extended fling with agoraphobia that I started following and taking notes on pornbots. It is, perhaps, a disturbed line to draw—or more disconcerting to confess—between myself and “hotbaby23 😈 ” but I also have unapologetically empathized with those Google DeepMind's bipedal robots struggling to adapt to being repeatedly kicked down during reinforcement learning sessions. I will come back to this when it feels relevant to talk about again. Maybe it’s about pornbot farms using the endlessly cloned and discarded limbs of women as myth and material; or the ills and cachets of authenticating bodies in the emergence of Musk’s purchasable verified badges, AI porn, and feminine self-optimization standards; or how exploitation begets exploitation since many of these eWhores are from across Africa and Asia. I do not have anything else to add right now except that being a woman offline or online sucks. You are not quite a real person in either. I feel like that bipedal robot most days.

Samiha Meem