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Trolls With LLM Slop Are Disrupting Communications About Mass Layoffs at IBM

posted by Roy Schestowitz on May 16, 2025,
updated May 17, 2025

This is what they might be trying to interfere with:

Layoffs this Week

As we mentioned and repeatedly said/showed last week, many comments (inside threads) and even entire new threats are trolls who use LLM slop to drown out the signal and unnecessarily provoke people. It's a well known PR tactic; many sites were subjected to the same, even decades ago. There are firms meant to do this (some blow the whistle, e.g. some people hired by Microsoft to troll Reddit). Here's an example from the past 10 hours alone:

Topics regarding layoffs at IBM

There are older examples, e.g.:

Arvind Krishna is exactly the kind of visionary leader IBM needs in today’s rapidly evolving tech landscape.

Also loads of comments to the same effect, at best engaging in time-wasting or emotional drain.

Some people will get fed up and leave, never to return. That's the goal.

One can only hypothesise (hard to prove) that those are PR/HR operatives (IBM's CEO openly boasts this month they're replacing HR with slop). They don't want people they besiege to be able to speak to one another, coordinate, make plans etc.

See below for a zeitgeist.

New example:

IBM replaces 200 HR jobs with AI as automation push grows

A bit older:

ibm hr when:6d


Update (a day later): Now it is getting even worse as they've begun vote-bombing. They try to bury legitimate pages while using some botnets or troll farms to upvote their own. They added several more in a few hours:

Please Stop the AI Slop

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