I don't think this kind of spam is new. Its just your perspective that determines this is immoral.
An argument can be made that any tool built to gain SEO advantage is also borderline immoral and those tool exists for almost a decade now. There are and have been bots to generate SEO content and/or spam websites and custom plugins for Wordpress which achieve that. All to game the search engine.
This too is immoral as it created what junk websites we have on the internet. And it was developer who started building it and/or was hired to do so.
Many years ago I quit my job at a search engine company for my personal ethics, because they had me start manipulating search results based on who paid for their entries.
Currently unemployed now (not due to ethics, but due to culling of tech jobs). I'm screwed. I won't take an unethical gig though. I have mentioned it before, I think my time is done here. :-/
An argument can be made that any tool built to gain SEO advantage is also borderline immoral and those tool exists for almost a decade now. There are and have been bots to generate SEO content and/or spam websites and custom plugins for Wordpress which achieve that. All to game the search engine.
This too is immoral as it created what junk websites we have on the internet. And it was developer who started building it and/or was hired to do so.