Substack: Spammed by Bots

2026-02-16 - Tel Aviv

My main blog, IsRafOK.com, serves a niche readership. Dedicated (thank you!) but small. (How many people are interested in an English rollup of Hebrew and Arabic sources in the Middle East?)

So, when entries started getting likes a couple weeks ago from IDs that don’t even read the blog, the smell was immediate:

Doing a survey of the IDs that are posting the Likes shows that they are clearly bot accounts. Either restacking other content, making air-filled posts on Substack, or both.

On a low traffic Substack like mine, I expect these likes to cause skew in page ranking.

The real problem, of course, is that IDs on Substack, like the rest of the internet, are not verified. Substack IDs do not map back to a real person.

So Likes and Restacks are meaningless.

Thought you’d like to know.