I recently clicked on the trending topic of Emily Ratajkowski posing head-to-toe nude for Bazaar magazine, and the first result was a guy who noticed something: almost all of the user-written statuses about the article supposedly expressing their unique opinion were essentially the same copy pasted in, but with a few minor variations.
Theory: Some publicity company is artificially creating trending topics by distributing a pre-written opinion with instructions for normal-seeming users to add their two-cents to the basic pasted paragraph, in order to artificially trigger Facebook’s trending algorithm to notice the story.
1. Since all of these posts are labeled public, I’ve opted to include their usernames visibly.
2. Notice that many of them are not just pages trying to gain hits to their page, but are just seemingly individuals, but still are pasting the same opinion with little or no editing of the text. Currently, this auto-pasting of the original share link’s text is not a feature of Facebook. You’d have to manually paste the text in yourself. The original text of a shared opinion post would be displayed below the link/photo, not above it.
For example:
The top 2 are the primary sources for traffic to be directed..
Then a few publicity pages trying to draw hits..
Then come the opinions, which are oddly similar in many cases.
Altered “in our birthday suits” to “naked”, added different final few sentences..
Added embellishments like “……” or emojis..
Added a sentence before “No problem”..
Then there’s this bozo, who pasted a few different versions after each other..
Bizzare.