Late at night, did the account "activate" again? A Shanghai woman’s account automatically posted a comment while she was sleeping. The platform responded: You accidentally triggered it.

(Source: The Observer News)

When you’re scrolling on your phone, have you ever suddenly realized you did something you “don’t remember” doing?

Recently, a resident of Shanghai, Ms. Jiang, shared her personal experience: while she was asleep, the account of a well-known lifestyle services platform somehow posted a comment under someone else’s post—“Do you have wifi?”

Does the account really “work on its own”?

Ms. Jiang recalled that she had no memory at all of that post, and that the time the comment was published was well after she had already fallen asleep. What left her even more baffled was that she hadn’t actually seen that post either—she had only browsed related merchants recently.

When faced with questions, the platform’s customer service said that their investigation found the account had only been logged into on Ms. Jiang’s own phone, ruling out the possibility of account theft.

Customer service speculated that this was most likely due to Ms. Jiang accidentally triggering the “Guess you might want to comment” automatic commenting feature.

This explanation made Ms. Jiang feel helpless: “My account suddenly starts saying things that I never intended to say, and things that I never intended to post. If that blogger hadn’t replied this time, I probably wouldn’t even have known.”

“As a user, even if I know I didn’t do it, it’s hard for me to prove it. In the end, it all came to nothing.”

Even more bizarrely, the reporter found that if users want to trace and check the comments left on their personal notes, they can only go through the browsing history one by one in “Recently Browsed” and then look in the comments section—truly like “finding a needle in a haystack.”

Not just leaving comments

Your account might also be

“Secretly making friends, playing ranked matches”

The “ghost comments” on lifestyle services platforms are only the tip of the iceberg. Abnormal actions by accounts across major platforms have made netizens exclaim, “The more you think about it, the scarier it gets.”

Some netizens said that on a certain app, Book, it also seems to “quietly” use your account to follow other people’s accounts.

“Every time, some totally inexplicable bloggers suddenly show up in my following list. A few days ago, I cleared my following list completely—I followed no one. But somehow they secretly added people back for me.”

This is no longer something that can be explained as an “accidental touch.” It’s more like the platform is forcibly doing social interactions on behalf of users.

Many players of a popular mobile game are also questioning whether the game secretly uses their accounts to serve as bots and play ranked matches.

You might not have even logged in, but your account is “fighting hard” in the arena. Does your account become “free labor” for maintaining game activity?

There are also netizens who shared that on a certain short-video platform, it sometimes independently controls users’ accounts—sharing videos with people they follow—but in reality, they usually don’t use it at all.

From automatic commenting, to secretly following without permission, to inexplicable sharing—this series of “shady operations” with accounts seems to be completely out of users’ control. No wonder some netizens complain: so I’m just the tenant of this account, and the platform can use it however it wants?

If this kind of situation is allowed to develop, will the future online world become a place where AI robots “entertain themselves”? Instead of real users’ voices, they’d be drowned out. This kind of “fake interaction” not only seriously degrades the user experience, but also makes platforms lose the real value of their traffic.

Moreover, once there are loopholes in the platform’s permission and control mechanisms, for these “platform-level” operations, users’ sensitive data—such as account information and consumption records—could also face the risk of leakage. That’s the most frightening hidden risk.

So what do you think? Have you encountered anything similar? Feel free to share in the comment section!

[Hello Shanghai · Tian Shiyong—comprehensive editing]

Massive information, precise analysis—available on the Sina Finance app