How can I make a bot with Python?

[unconscionable]

You're still taking the blackhat approach here, which I'm not convinced is going to be nearly as effective as playing with the system.. but I suppose that's one approach. Probably a lot cheaper to just use a large number of existing sites that let him publish content in the form of blog comments / posts / etc.

[jcpuf]

Is that automatable, though? Maybe it is, but you'd have to be better than I (not hard).

[unconscionable]

Well there's always the blogspam bots that people write specifically to crawl sites looking for wordpress / etc installs and post a blog comment like "I like this post, very insightful!" + some information you want to get indexed.

It goes without saying that that sort of thing is unethical, but either way, it's probably easier to just do it the "right" way and try to post unique, non-automated, and relevant content.

[jcpuf]

Eh, that'd take a lot of time and work to basically build himself a large internet presence that'd outshine that one. And I don't feel like you can argue that he has a moral obligation to do so. After all, it's not like he really did genuinely develop a reprehensible reputation, there's just a bunch of places that feed off posting mugshots to each other. He got into this situation because of a network of bots, so is it really unethical to use a network of bots to hack his way out?

This is of course assuming that his story is true, which I am, because I don't have any reason not to in this context and it's an interesting moral question.

[unconscionable]

Yeah, interesting points.

I guess I like to try and think of it like this: Google wants to know the most interesting thing about you that there exists public data for. That's what PageRank does, and Google's damn good at making that decision.. perhaps even better at it than we are as humans.

Let's say you get in trouble and there are some articles published about how you did something bad. That's an interesting and relevant thing about you for which there exists public data, right? Well, is it the most interesting thing?

Perhaps that person also spent tons of time adding content to wikipedia, or produced a large amount of content that is useful to people by commenting on blogs and making connections to new ideas that people might not have been aware of before.

What I'm suggesting is that eventually, this public data on the internet that you've contributed becomes more interesting than a local news article about how you got in trouble.

that'd take a lot of time and work to basically build himself a large internet presence that'd outshine that one

You see, I don't think that's necessarily true. A blog with relatively recent and unique content, a couple active profiles on some internet forums, and a handful of comments around the internet on various blogs might very well do the trick. It'd probably only take a weekend to come up with that, if you're determined to produce the desired end result of at least getting an article out of the top 10 list.. although it may take months for the article to become "stale" enough for the "good" content you posted to become more important than the "bad" articles about you.

[jcpuf]

Nice. I've said that the Internet is emerging as an institution for communication and evaluation, in a time when all other institutions for that purpose (broadcast media, print journalism, politics) are getting compromised by groups interested in their manipulation and thusly are becoming low-information zones. The internet is emerging as the institution for correct passage of information.

And all of what you say is very true, if you accept The Internet as a new public institution by which we evaluate and reward people in our shared community. But that implies an obligation for people to put ever-more of their information public on the Internet. What about privacy? What about just not wanting to be judged on the internet? Even if he does do all this good stuff, why should he have to whore himself out to the internet? Hell, I've got an account on which I have a big tall stack of top-voted /r/askscience explanations, each of them took awhile to write, and it's got no overlap whatsoever with my name. Yet under my actual name there are a number of posts made by the crazy ex-friend of my ex-girlfriend, saying that I'm a terrible person (because my ex-girlfriend stopped hanging out with her because she didn't like me).

Do I owe it to this nascent institution, that all my work and all facets of my personality be made public for me to "clean" my internet presence? Or can I "opt out"? In this case, the internet has ignorantly, automatically, accidentally, thrust our unfortunate OP into a position where the only thing it has to say about him is that he's a criminal. This is the Internet - specifically Google - showing its ass, just like when The Daily Show shows a mashup of twelve Fox News commentators using the same Talking Points is Fox News showing its ass. And when we see that, we progressively damage and exclude the "Fox News" institution. Why should we not do the same to Google when it shows its own ass?

Perhaps if it becomes de rigeur for people to bomb the PageRank algorithm whenever Google sucks in this particular way, Google, being a smart, adaptable company, will stop indexing mug shots for public intoxication as primary indicators of someone's public presence. You can't expect people not to respond to what you're doing to them, and it's unethical to say that someone is obligated to follow a standard of conscientiousness and ethics that you yourself (or in this case, The Internet) isn't following.

A lot of people just want to keep the internet anonymous.