A couple years or so ago, I was minding my business scrolling through Quora when I saw a spam post advertising a fake designer handbag site. I did what I normally do, reported it for spam and moved on.

Quora’s feed is shaped by engagement; what you respond to, you see more of. Rather perversely, Quora considers reporting content to be “engagement,” meaning if you report romance scammers you see more romance scammers, if you report trolls you see more trolls, and in this case, if you report more designer handbag spammers you see more designer handbag spammers. So I started seeing more of them. And more. And more after that.

I reported them, and saw more, and reported them, and saw more. “Huh,” I said, “that’s weird. I wonder how many there are?”

I did some digging, deliberately searching out these spam accounts, and by a rough back of the envelope calculation I estimated there were likely somewhere between 6,000 and 8,000 fake Quora profiles spamming these fake designer handbag sites.

I was so very, very wrong. There are so many more than that. The network is huge, and organized, it’s advertising a whole cluster of phony counterfeit handbag sites, and every time I revised my estimate upward I found that I was still lowballing the size of it.

It’s also not advertising to Quora users, oh no. It’s trying to trick AIs like Google Gemini into recommending the fake handbag sites.

The rest of this is a pretty deep dive into how the network works, with some thoughts on AI poisoning as a marketing strategy. Want to know more? Follow the white rabbit 🐇, and I’ll show you how deep the rabbit hole goes.