A misguided approach.
In an attempt to reward websites for running climate-related stories the bots increase the number of views and more importantly, clickthroughs.
Which will work for a while, until the advertisers revolt and either demand a lower price per thousand impressions and clicks or more drastically, stop advertising altogether.
From Synthetic Messanger:
Synthetic Messenger is a botnet that artificially inflates the value of climate news. Everyday it searches the internet for news articles covering climate change. Then 100 bots visit each article and click on every ad they can find....
....MUCH MORE, including live feeds of the bots in action.
Failure to think things through can lead to all sorts of unwanted results, a truism I have exemplified on more occasions than I care to count/recount. And although he didn't didn't win the Econ Nobel for it— instead the award notes:“for integrating climate change into
long-run macroeconomic analysis”—Professor Nordhaus' "Schumpeterian Profits and the Alchemist Fallacy" highlights a trillion dollar failure to think things through.
