this post was submitted on 13 Aug 2026
190 points (97.5% liked)
Not The Onion
22230 readers
1248 users here now
Welcome
We're not The Onion! Not affiliated with them in any way! Not operated by them in any way! All the news here is real!
The Rules
Posts must be:
- Links to news stories from...
- ...credible sources, with...
- ...their original headlines, that...
- ...would make people who see the headline think, “That has got to be a story from The Onion, America’s Finest News Source.”
Please also avoid duplicates.
Comments and post content must abide by the server rules for Lemmy.world and generally abstain from trollish, bigoted, ableist, or otherwise disruptive behavior that makes this community less fun for everyone.
And that’s basically it!
founded 3 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
I don't have an issue with accounts that declare themselves as bots, I like that Lemmy has this as a feature. More social media platforms should do this. It's that there are, like you said, bad actors that aim to deceive.
Honestly I'm on the fence on if this account is a bot or a person. The timestamps between post and comment are plausible, but that could be manufactured delay. The one thing I'm sure of is the account is shilling this website that it links to 99% of the time, and if you look around in the site, is a bizarre collection of news articles, blatant clickbait (especially in the Health section), ads for scholarships (??) and song lyrics and "meanings" which are 100% AI generated.
The website appears to have very few named authors, which is also weird. Most of the content just reeks of AI though.
I've seen accounts like these follow the exact same playbook when I used to browse reddit. Trying to drive up traffic and clicks for that ad money. This one is definitely aiming to deceive.
Some examples:
A sizable chunk of this website are "articles" similar to this.