Why are they repeating themselves?

Aged, US-based, Twitter accounts, complete with verified email addresses and the original verification email can be purchased for as little as $5 each. Accounts opened in Turkey are considerably cheaper, with another seller offering newer accounts for as little as a dollar each. Stolen Pinterest credentials cost a bit more, presumably because Pinterest attracts a different demographic. A single login, together with password, and verification email from 2007 will set you back twenty bucks. By contrast, Instagram accounts are cheap, and according to the information dumped into the Cyberpunks.com comment section, we can buy ten basic accounts with no posts, created between 2015 and 2017, for 30 US-dollars.

What we love most about these comments is the level of customer service. You’ll be surprised by a spammer’s response time! And they all accept a wide range of payment methods such as crypto, Paypal, Skrill, and even CS:GO skins. Most encourage the use of an escrow agent so that buyers can be sure they get what they’re paying for. There’s a one-hour replacement guarantee if you have a problem with the account.

Those dodgy Facebook links your uncle keeps sending you? This is where they come from. Or maybe your uncle’s just a dick. We don’t know, we’ve (probably) never met him. Does he fuck dogs in Finland?

To be honest, we’re beginning to suspect that some of these comments aren’t even boilerplate or written by humans at all. It’s quite likely that they’re generated and posted by a script which scans the internet for WordPress sites, and posts random crap into the comments section, with links to whichever site is paying them today. Some of these scripts have been running for years, and while the links change, the comments themselves may not.

Take this comment, for example: “Hi there, You have done an incredible job. I’ll certainly digg it and personally suggest to my friends. I am confident they will be benefited from this site.”

It seems innocent enough. Yes, we do do an incredible job, and the promise of a personal recommendation is almost enough to make us click on the approve button.

But the user name is anal sex, and the linked ‘personal webpage’ is to a fake news site in Korea. Digg was a website which operated in a way similar to the way reddit does now. Users could post links, and their popularity would be determined by the number of Diggs they received — similar to an upvote or a like.

With the rise of Facebook and various pay-per-Digg controversies undermining its credibility (how we laugh from the distant shores of 2020), the site eventually failed. Digg still exists in some diminished form, but users haven’t been able to “digg” anything for nearly a decade. We needed to find out just how long this comment has been around.

A quick search shows us that the same exact wording has appeared in the comments section of over 479,000 different WordPress-based sites, and as far as we can tell, first popped into being on January 1st, 2000, on a Brazilian film review site which is still active today. It’s possible the comment was minted even earlier, but that’s as far back as Google will let us go.

It’s a ghost comment, floating across the internet like a virtual Mary Celeste. It may be even be the oldest-surviving artifact of comment spam in existence, and, to quote Dr. Henry Jones, Jr., “it belongs in a museum.”