Nearly Half of Sony PS Boycott Replies Were Fake Bot Accounts

A new study found that almost half the replies to Sony's PlayStation boycott campaign came from fake accounts, with bots racking up over 1 million views.

So much for that PlayStation boycott you kept seeing everywhere. A new study says nearly half the replies tied to the August "blackout" campaign came from fake accounts.

The research comes from Cyabra, a US data analytics firm. It found that almost 50 percent of replies on Sony's official PlayStation channels were "inauthentic" — meaning they were posted by bogus profiles. That's a wild number, and it says a lot about how much of social media chatter is actually just automated noise.

Quick recap if you missed it: Sony announced it would stop producing first-party physical game discs starting in 2028, and plenty of players were not happy. By late August, some fans launched the "blackout" campaign, urging people to disconnect their consoles and stay offline to hit Sony's monthly active user numbers and cut spending inside the PlayStation ecosystem.

According to Cyabra's September study, it identified close to 1,000 fake profiles that spammed PlayStation's official accounts with automated posts, creating pure "noise." Those fake accounts pulled in more than 1 million views and got reshared over 100,000 times. The study also found that spelling variants like "#NoDiskNoBuy" were amplified almost 90 percent by bots.

Here's the twist, though — Cyabra says the posts with the highest engagement still came from real users. About 28 percent of the key posts on the topic came from accounts with fewer than 5,000 followers, and those went viral naturally because they genuinely reflected how players felt.

And despite how loud the boycott looked online, US data shows it didn't actually move Sony's engagement numbers. Everyone's still waiting on Sony's financial report to confirm that. Meanwhile, discussion around physical games under PlayStation posts has been cooling off over the past few months, and bot engagement has dropped noticeably too.

One thing worth stressing: the study doesn't claim that no players are genuinely upset about Sony's decision. It just shows how much of the conversation was pushed along by bots. As the social media war enters a new phase, it's not exactly shocking that a boycott significantly boosted by fake accounts would struggle to make a real dent.

Did you see any of these boycott posts in your feed? Let us know in the comments.