Part of me thinks reddit barely even needs that level of astroturfing, because the majority of its users are already the right kind of college-aged nerds in their own special little echo-chambers. But no doubt it's still happening in full force, because god forbid they ever have a crisis of conscience.
Reddit is astroturfed with bots. You can see one of those garbage reactionary posts on r/TIL, r/pics, r/Interesting(i don't remember the exact sub name) getting 100k+ upvotes within 1-2 hours. Not to mention the amount of "I am a socialist but something pro state propaganda" on left wing subs. Not hard to train bots to respond like real human either.
Not hard to train bots to respond like real human either.
They don't even need to do that, they just need a few real people scanning the feed and passing links to their botnet. They may have done something clever to avoid the bots being easily detectable, or just as likely they're conspiring with reddit's white supremacist and CIA alumni admins to be exempted from the automatic detection tools.
FIFY "Not hard to train a real human to respond like bots either"
This is the real intention behind most of the western bots at least in this study. The information flows out from the western bots to the non bots who then repeat what the bots tell them often using the same words.
Even then reddit is incredibly hamfisted with the way it approaches propaganda. Just throwing awards at radio free asia news stories in r/worldnews and having mods deleting every comment that criticizes the source (even when this amounts to 40-50% of total comments).
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Part of me thinks reddit barely even needs that level of astroturfing, because the majority of its users are already the right kind of college-aged nerds in their own special little echo-chambers. But no doubt it's still happening in full force, because god forbid they ever have a crisis of conscience.
Reddit is astroturfed with bots. You can see one of those garbage reactionary posts on r/TIL, r/pics, r/Interesting(i don't remember the exact sub name) getting 100k+ upvotes within 1-2 hours. Not to mention the amount of "I am a socialist but something pro state propaganda" on left wing subs. Not hard to train bots to respond like real human either.
They don't even need to do that, they just need a few real people scanning the feed and passing links to their botnet. They may have done something clever to avoid the bots being easily detectable, or just as likely they're conspiring with reddit's white supremacist and CIA alumni admins to be exempted from the automatic detection tools.
FIFY "Not hard to train a real human to respond like bots either" This is the real intention behind most of the western bots at least in this study. The information flows out from the western bots to the non bots who then repeat what the bots tell them often using the same words.
Even then reddit is incredibly hamfisted with the way it approaches propaganda. Just throwing awards at radio free asia news stories in r/worldnews and having mods deleting every comment that criticizes the source (even when this amounts to 40-50% of total comments).
I’m reminded of a video/story that TWICE made the front page showing how easy it is to manipulate reddits frontpage and therefore reddit itself