New Study: At Least 15% of All Reddit Content is Corporate Trolls Trying to Manipulate Public Opinion
New Study: At Least 15% of All Reddit Content is Corporate Trolls Trying to Manipulate Public Opinion
Used Reddit for years. There's no way the percentage is that low.
That is probably correct. 15% of total content, but probably 70% of the content you see. Reddit has a tonne of content posted that almost nobody sees
15% of content and then fake upvoted to heaven. Could work
You don't need much content or many comments to achieve the goal, when you have thousands of votes behind it for the good placement.
You may only need a couple hundred though. Reddit's algorithm is particularly broken and once a post is on hot it's unstoppabe.
Looking for office equipment recommendations on Reddit recently, every single thread had fake suggestions that were clearly advertiser accounts. They sounded incredibly fake like bots that pulled descriptions from Amazon, all had similar links with tracking, and all were upvoted to the top.
Right!? At least on Lemmy I can drink my Pepsi® in peace. Like for real, there's nothing better than scrolling through some funny memes with a delicious can of ice cold Pepsi®, my fellow [insert slang term; plural]!
Lol. I guess it's hard to tell when you haven't seen the site change over time but.. yeah?
It uses to be "argumentless" discussions on esoteric tech and philosophy issues.. then a few years later it was people commenting the same 9 memes for 9,000 comments.. then a few years later suddenly everyone's anecdotes are praising China, or capitalism, or offhandedly mentioning some product or influencer.
Tbh tho, most of Reddit now just reads like Subreddit Simulator. All of the site's value regarding sincere, unique, and detailed user content.. yeah, that's gone. They're just coasting on past laurels, will be fun to watch the wheels fall off as the data stays locked in 2023, before the LLM Ouroboros.
A few very niche subs appear unaffected, but mostly the questions are all like someone shook a magic 8 ball and the same crap pops up over and over and over.
You know how your brain feels after being assaulted by a commercial? Reddit feels more like that now.
That's the part that people don't get and is intentionally hard to find numbers on. The entire appeal was on it not being an influencer centric space. The entire value was always at odds with monetizing that value beyond it's upkeep and paying the people (who apparently aren't that many) a reasonable salary. It is the worst growth case you could have ever had.
The same thing that happened to Digg
Reddit is going to end up just being trolls arguing with bots and corporate shills... if it isn't already. I haven't been there in a long time, but I'm fairly confident in that assessment.
What i really wonder about is how long a site can profit off of the majority of activity coming from bots. I'm not tech savvy enough to know if the analytics can tell the difference between a bot posting and a person. How long can that go on before the site stops being profitable via ads? Will companies pay to advertise to bots? Would they even know? It's kinda funny to think about honestly.
It'll be really interesting to see how reddit's downfall comes to be though.
What's damning is how the most harmless subreddits is now full of astroturfing. Television subreddit? Suddenly the top article is praising some show you never heard of. Meme subreddit? Here's a meme about some music video or hot new product. Game subreddit? Here's some random cosplay girl that's only here to advertise her social media.
I don't remember who said it but there's a general rule that if your subreddit has over 500k subscribers, it's already full of bots and dying. Any mainstream sub is insanely astroturfed.
And don't get me fucking started on social media twitter accounts. HAHA GUYS CHECK OUT THIS FUNNY MEME SHARED BY #WENDY'S!!
then a few years later suddenly everyone's anecdotes are praising China, or capitalism, or offhandedly mentioning some product or influencer.
There used to be a satire sub called Church of the Current Thing that made fun of this phenomenon. It eventually got banned around 2022 thanks to a cohort of bad faith actors mass-filing dubious reports of subs they didn't like.
(I believe there was also a sub devoted to cataloging all such subs that got paved over in the name of le brand safetyTM, but it may have also gone the same way. I don't keep up with the place)
I mean you can see it happening here. How many cyber armies do you think are starting to pop up on Lemmy, from the US, from China, from Russia. How many corporate astroturfers do you think are coming on here, apple dicksuckers, etc. shit, mainstream media is trying to dip it's toes into federated spaces.
Edit: a word, added an -ing
Addendum: Do you guys think that defederation campaigns can be weaponized? Isolate and destroy type stuff? Creating bubbles that can be easily analyzed and manipulated?
They will certainly come here, but as a defederated website we don't have to defend against them with one approach, everyone can take a different approach, see what frustrates them the most, then mass adopt that. I see this as the ideal.. no idea how it will unfold in practice.
Lemmy wouldn't have that problem because we're all too busy enjoying an ice cold Coca-Cola.
Please drink verification can now.
"McDonald's!"
Omg the amount of sneaky coke ads I saw on that site was insane
Absolutely disgusting that someone would sell out like that. Not me, my integrity is strong like the legal protection I get from litigatenow.com, where you can sign up for a free consultation today, if you use my referral code #loveads2024
Ha, I've discovered your hidden advertising like I discovered the great taste of a crunchy Big Kahuna Burger.
Let's check out some random customer opinions:
Jules W.: "Mm-hmm! This is a tasty burger!"
Marvin: "Mind-blowing!"
Ad comment in reality:
^453 u/DrJamieSmith34:
Actually fast food isn’t that bad for you. A Big Mac for example has everything you need nutrition wise. Carbs, veggies, protein.
Pepsi, the choice of a new generation.
Dead internet here we come!
Makes me miss the wild west days of the internet. Everything felt more... human. Now it feels like a soulless corporate husk. It's wild that covid babies won't know what those days were like.
For me, it was AIM chatrooms and ebaums forums, maybe the super early days of Skype (before being sold to Microsoft obviously). Shit did feel more real, and while content maybe didn't come out at the same frequency, and there sure was shit, you just knew you were talking about it with other people. Made some good friends back then, would've been cool to stay in touch, but 20+ years is a long time.
You're right in that it will never be like it was, but there are still fringes and niche communities that have that human feel. The thing is they're much less engaging without algorithms and UX driving engagement, we're not drawn to them in the same way.
wild west days of the internet
What age would that be? The time around 2014? 2010? 1990?
those are some low numbers. between corporate, state, and anonymous shills and trolls, I wholly believe at least 50% of all reddit content is paid for or manipulative for agenda based groups. the sheer number of repetitve posts with repetitve comments constantly being on the front page is pure propaganda. Of course I rmemebr back in the old days when the reddit feed was in (almost) real time where you couldliterally wait every 10 minutes and refresh for an almost completely new front page. Now it's all about repetivie agendas and narratives operating in cycles to manipulate public opinions. the same lame post will sit on the front page for entire days.
I'd say there is a huge amount of bots, then the smart bots, then the actual shills. The smarter ones run complex operations and are able to use their own power to self propel their own stories. And there are a lot of similar 'power users' who are not wholly paid for by someone but would do work for the highest bidder. I'd bet that yes, 50% of what's on the front page of major things is reputation management or Hail Corporate stuff, then I'd wager the mostly less popular stuff is actual people, with a ton of bad posts from all sides at the low popularity
I've said this before, but we also need to be cautious about this on lemmy and devise ways to empower mods and the community to fight back against this, I'm not entirely sure how since it's a very complex problem
I am convinced this is already happening. One example is the endless new accounts posting ibtimes links.
There are also propoganda websites posted regularly by new accounts (especially sowing disinformation about Russia's war on Ukraine).
Basically be wary of anything posted where it's their first post. Often they make accounts and don't use them for months so they look older.
I also think astroturfing is happening but at lower rate than reddit.
Like you, I have no idea how we can counter this at scale.
The same critical thinking should apply as all other platforms.
A link posted to an article on a company's public blog published in the last 24hrs? Almost certainly viral marketing.
It's bloody difficult.
I used to mod on /r/videos years and years back. We had this one guy who was not very active as a mod in the day to day stuff, but was respected because he'd basically disappear for a few months and then reappear with a huge post in our modding sub basically going "so these are all spammers/malicious actors, here's their profiles, the accounts were created in these waves, here's where they've copied existing posts / the identical generic comments and things they use to get around our posting requirements, the targets they've been promoting, etc". Just huge pages of thoroughly researched proof.
This was well before we had huge awareness of situations like Russia manipulating social media - it was usually those viral video places that buy up rights to videos and handle licensing and promotion. It's why for a long time any licensed videos from places like viralhog etc were outright banned - they were constantly trying to manipulate reddit postings in bad faith, and even trying to socially engineer the mod team in modmail, so any videos that mentioned a licensing deal in the description were automatically banned from posting.
If we didn't have that one guy spotting the patterns, most of it would have gotten by easily. Unfortunately he did eventually disappear for good. No clue what happened to him, hope he just cut out social media or something. But with the spamming and astroturfing stuff... Even after fighting it for years I can't tell you what to do to counter it besides "have more of that guy".
Very interesting
Most, if not all game reddits, product reddits, and company reddits are secretly or openly controlled by their respective corpos. Keeping communities as third party forums is a must have IMO.
I agree, this is a very complex issue. As a community we should come together and brainstorm ideas while quenching our thirst with a nice can of Diet Pepsi, the zero-sugar alternative to being thirsty!
Capitalism consumes everything.
Doesn't communism consume everything too?
No. The goal of capitalism is to turn all things into commodities to be bought and sold. It has the growth pattern of cancer. Communism is a moneyless, stateless, classless society where would be free to focus on human-centred objectives like feeding and housing all people, making our environment sustainable, pursuing scientific and academic goals without need for a profit to be generated just for the sake of endless commodification.
No, communism kills everyone. That's a big difference.
One thing I've noticed over the years is that in terms of marketing, reddit has a disproportionately high level of return in interaction relative to its size, while Twitter has traditionally had a low level of return relative to its size.
For some reason, comments on reddit has always been viewed as more trustworthy relative to other social media platform, despite reddit or's general reputation for being confidently incorrect on many subjects.
There are certain people whose entire career was made by their reddit posts, yet, it was always odd to me that reddit never managed to effectively capitalize on this other than making their platform worse with every update.
Testing out this theory has been interesting.
I worked at startups and I'm not going to deny that I was absolutely horking my company as a solution for years on Reddit. Especially with niche products.
This was from 2014-2018, and then I left startups and worked in corps.
When Google has plans to slurp reddit comments, I bet I could gamify reddit even more.
Reddit's strategy is genuinely brain dead. Just think of the shit they've been up to:
Truly the works of geniuses.
Only 15% 🤨
at least
Uh, no, not "only"
"Only at least 15%"
As in one could expect the study to yield a higher low bound.
Up to 15% or more.
A good chunk of the rest is morons parroting them.
Y combinator discussion suggests this author posts completely made up garbage:
The director of marketing at my company just got out of a meeting with reddit and is super hyped at funneling all our Facebook and Twitter dollars into reddit instead. I didn't have the heart to tell him he's five years too late.
Is fb or twitter really any more useful for ads though?
I scoped out reddit as a marketer for a few companies over the years. It's just a standard brand awareness piece. Unless their targeting has got better, I recall you had to dump a minimum of $10k/month and your ad just "got shown" to whomever
I assume they let you target by subreddit and user interest now, but it still can't be that accurate
lol. That’s funny as hell. Might as well shift some money to it for a different market penetration but not all of it
Not surprising at all.
In other news, GTA Online is awesome! I am definitely not a plant or anything like that, go check out GTA Online!
Or something like that.
lol
I remember when /r/HailCorporate was a trending sub and then it just sort of got strangled to death.
Also remember the periodic waves of "Hillary is bae! Mother of dragons! Yas Queen!" and "I love Mayor Pete" and "KHive ftw!" and even a smattering of Mitt Romney fanboi-ism on /r/politics, as their campaigns rose and fell.
Nevermind the absolutely sycophantic corporate ghoul AMAs. Bill Gates, Ann Coulter, and Don Lemon all leap to mind. Just the absolute worst moderation imaginable for these guys. Then there was the Elon Musk AMA. Jesus fucking Christ.
oh yah, I remember the absolute torrent of crypto shills that started spamming the place when crypto shill posts from other subs started getting posted there.
They were proper angry that they got called out.
Those of us who noticed when HailCorporate first got shadowbanned could see that particular train a coming. Reddit was always going to strangle its own content to death in order to make it more advertiser friendly. I'm honestly surprised it took as long as it did.
"At least" doing a lot of lifting here.
Well, you've gotta leave enough of a percentage for all the Russian and CCP sockpuppets.
Yeah I was surprised the state propagandists left the corpos that much market share.
The next 65% are political trolls
Uh, this post is a bummer and I don't even know if I actually believe the premise... Whatever I guess, lett's all actually just get out of here and go get some Sprite® brand family products, you guys.
But 7up™ is made with natural ingredients, less sugar and is more limey!
My family prefers Brawndo. It has what plants crave.
Remember the_donald started out as a meme sub that got taken over? I fell victim to astroturfing that election season. Thankfully it has made me more skeptical about online interactions now.
"At least..."
I feel like the 15% number is very, very low.
According to backlink.com there is 265,500,000 active users per week so 15% of those weekly users means there is 39,825,000 corporate removed per week. To have the corporate removed filled with real people you would need the entire population of the following cities to even come close:
New York, NY 8,258,035
Los Angeles, CA 3,820,914
Chicago, IL 2,664,452
Houston, TX 2,314,157
Phoenix, AZ 1,650,070
Philadelphia, PA 1,550,542
San Antonio TX 1,495,295
San Diego, CA 1,388,320
Dallas, TX 1,302,868
Jacksonville, FL 985,843
Austin, TX 979,882
Fort Worth, TX 978,468
San Jose, CA 969,655
Columbus, OH 913,175
Charlotte, NC 911,311
Indianapolis, IN 879,293
San Francisco, CA 808,988
Seattle, WA 755,078
Denver, CO 716,577
Oklahoma City, OK 702,767
Nashville, TN 687,788
Washington, DC 678,972
El Paso, TX 678,958
Las Vegas, NV 660,929
Boston, MA 653,833
Detroit, MI 633,218
Portland, OR 630,498
Louisville, KY 622,981
Memphis, TN 618,639
People are literally defenceless vs propaganda. Me too. It takes extraordinary effort to decipher the fake from true and whether the true is a full truth or some small piece on silver platter.
At this point I gave up and I just try to find out motives of every… player and align myself with these that best serve my interests.
I don’t read much news because it’s all leftist or alt right propaganda drivel and while I align myself with the left because it serves my interests the best I won’t waste my time listening to their whatever narrative they crafted last week…
Just observe their actions and try to find out the motives and then ask if their motives align with yours. Their words or narrative are worthless drivel at this point, mostly.
Alt right drivel however is especially toxic and insulting but that is specifically done to evoke emotions. Anti gay propaganda crafted by closeted bisexual priests that want a piece from the table. It’s a bit like these email scammers who filter out less naive by making lots of grammar errors on purpose. You are supposed to be enraged either way.
Have you ever seen Adam Curtis's "Century of the Self"? Super long, but it goes on about how marketing and politics intertwined.
I think it's on YouTube for free
Why is Medium conflating trolls and shills?
Paid propagandists are shills, not trolls.
Agreed. Trolls don't conceal themselves
True. For example I'm here for pleasure not for business.
Key word: At least
And now imagine that companies paid reddit money to be enabled to train their AI on them...
I don’t have a Medium account. Could someone post a link to the study?
Archival link: https://archive.is/D60ep
Link to the study: https://www.pewresearch.org/internet/2017/03/29/the-future-of-free-speech-trolls-anonymity-and-fake-news-online/
Thank you
Wonder what the percent of AI datasets being propaganda is
Yes.
I'm confused. So this is a study that shows that significant less content on reddit is bots and trolls than it seems? Like ONLY 15%?
I feel like 15% would have been a realistic number a few years ago, but nowadays you have a hard time comunicating with a real human. A bit like online customer service.
I was also surprised, then I read how this is based on two studies, one four and and the other six years old. Now it makes sense: this was during the good old days!
This 15% isn't inclusive of ALL bots and trolls. Just the corporate sponsored ones.
15% only? Not bad I’d say. I was expecting more like 30%+
"at least" 15%
Fair point.
I remember writing a comment about invasive advertising by Instagram. Just shared some anecdotes about how a few extremely specific conversation topics soon became the topic for the ads I was seeing on Instagram, and pointed out that if they were in fact using background conversation to target ads, it would be extremely easy to automate with the voice recognition technology available at the time, so why would they ignore the opportunity if targeted ads are their main source of revenue?
It became one of my most down voted comments at the time, and I had about twice as many replies as downvotes, claiming all kinds of wild or easily disproven shit to disprove the idea that Instagram used such tactics. Was very fishy
And remember, if THEY have thousands of bots that each 'think independently' but still end up downvoting your post en masse, then that's totally fine. But if YOU try to upvote your post with one of your alts so it doesn't get buried, that's bannable.
To be fair mods did try to take action against that and they did have tools. How well they worked is not something I will pretend to even guess at.
Go to r/virtualreality and try to give a negative opinion about meta and the quest 3.
You regularly see posts with 10k+ upvotes and about 5 comments. Even the users say it's scummy as hell.
That's alarmingly low - it suggests that it doesn't take much for any given influencing campaign. If there are fifteen discrete such campaigns in play, that's just 1/100 of everyone. Now imagine that there's tens of such campaigns, and the numbers look even more reasonable. Also, it's probably cost-effective at this scale since this has been with us a while, which is terrifying.
What I want to know is: what percentage are human users that ate the onion metaphorical tequila worm1 and are now parroting these trolls?
1 Follow me here: drink a bottle and eat the worm inside. You're not thinking straight and did something you wouldn't do if you had your wits about you, or maybe a friend nearby that is thinking clearly. Propaganda has a way of forcing you into a phantasm by emotional manipulation, making it easy to jam all kinds of nonsense into your head. Extending the metaphor, said propaganda also lays out how to defend your worm eating habit as though it's totally normal to do.
Actually that is not true your interactions are very authentic. Beep boop.
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YOUR ACCENT IS STRANGE, FELLOW HUMAN
HA HA! I COPIED THIS CODE BLOCK TO PROCESS IT AND FOUND IT VERY HUMOROUS! THE ONLY THING THAT COULDof course, here.is.my. Information!
124 Shell Lane, Fontana Georgia Michael Handly 000-01-0000 Thank. You for .the. gracious. Offer. ! I.will.provide.my.banking.info.in.future....
It makes me feel weird when I try to recommend stuff I really like. I'll be so in favor of the things I like that it sounds like I'm selling it to you because I want you to like it too. I'm sure some people think I'm shilling the Steam Deck.
Same. I try to steer people to ALDI for groceries cause they were the least fuckwadish the past few years about price gouging and I sometimes feel like I'm shilling. I only wish I were getting paid for it :\
Second, given that the author has hidden this in a paywall--you have to sign up in order to access the article and presumably any links--I'm going to immediately distrust the motives.
Third, Medium is a glorified blogging site; anyone can say anything on it.
The “author” is citing a study. Idk why you’d indict the study because the media that is making you aware of the existence of said study is behind a paywall. Bizarre reasoning.
Hmmm, not necessarily all that bizarre. The title on the Lenny link states that 15% of ALL Reddit content is corporate trolls trying to sway public opinion - now that this gentleperson has kindly provided the link to a non-paywall version, I can see that this is 2 studies, one from 2018 and one from 2020, one of which states that 15% of the top 100 subreddits may have experienced corporate trolls and/or bots posting content at some point, but they don’t say how much.
Huge difference between the title and the substance of the article, they buried the lede in a somewhat clever way. Chances are the author (and editor) are well aware that most of their audience doesn’t have an account, and aren’t going to create an account - therefore, by posting a misleading title (or letting others exaggerate the claims in the title through links on other platforms) they can reach a far larger audience, and sway public opinion more effectively, by burying the actual context behind the paywall.
I mean, I don’t know that that is what’s happening, but it makes a lot of sense and kind of rhymes with the whole point of the article, so yeah - I don’t trust their motives either, and I can definitely see the logic behind distrusting paywalls on principle.
I’m going to immediately distrust the motives.
Additionally, the data is self-reported surveys with questions like "Have you ever been contacted by someone from a company or corporation?" and... yeah? This part shouldn't be surprising to any platform that allows private messages. And "Have you ever seen someone promoting a product?" and most people are going to either shrug or already have a strong opinion, it's not very scientific for actual data on the actual traffic from bots and corporate shills, more how the human users feel about the platform.
I would much rather see an independent investigation from a technical point-of-view, which tracks the comments and timing of user comments to determine how many are actually bots just quietly gaining karma with innocuous comments, or how many are just programmed to go to certain subreddits at certain times to push a narrative.
Glad they included "at least" because there's no way it's that low.
You can tell by the amount of reddit posts or comments that links you a paywalled article. Like what the fuck?! Is everyone paying for this shit?
Thanks for sharing
I just want more people to LEAVE Reddit. To hell with corporate agendas, cowardly moderators, and incompetent admin. The internet needs an open source platform like Reddit where you can voice your opinion, no matter how flawed it may be, without concern you'll be "banned"...
Second, end users need to display more maturity and stop being so sensitive.....a BLOCK resolves 99.99% of ANY. "Moderator" involvement. "****" words is about all they need to "censor" and even that's questionable. Mods should just focus on actual bots and sub organization not so much the content police, most stuff can be self regulated.....
Lemmy, albeit I don't think the name is good for brand recognition, the functionality is ok, similar, just needs the audience. Even YouTube and Facebook....."community guidelines " ....I "offended" the AI,.... this is dire times and sadly most are not even aware. Without US these platforms don't exist. Facebook wouldn't be Facebook if it weren't for the USERS so why are you micromanaging them..... YouTube videos have to say "unalive" "deleted" "no longer with us" instead of kill murder death... it's so cringe and I'm so upset that critical thinking, having an opinion, being an adult using "curse" words is problematic..... I look forward to Reddit crashing. I look forward to mods crashing as well. They ruined the open space to speak freely.... but again the massess go along to get along and they continue to win.......
The word "troll" just kinda doesn't mean much anymore, huh.
A troll is just someone who says something to provoke a (usually negative) response. They don't have any agenda other than to entertain themselves.
A dude going into a Fortnite community to post "Fortnite sucks ass" is a troll. A dude posting propaganda to sway opinions toward a political goal/shill a product is something else.
I suppose they're using the term troll to refer to a person engaging in behavior calculated to evoke a desired response while evading detection as doing such. It was actually used similarly in at least one academic paper back in the nineties: "Identity and deception in the virtual community", by Judith S. Donath.
Lower than I expected
I just hope that the next new study doesn't end up being "New Study: At Least 15% of All Lemmy Content is Corporate Trolls Trying to Manipulate Public Opinion", otherwise I would be wondering WTF is going on, is Lemmy on the way of being enshittified by Corporate Morons?
Hey, good to see you around! How is your koala community going?
If it's not corporations then it's PACs astroturfing. It's nothing new.
Companies definitely astroturf on Reddit, but, they do it through third or even fourth parties. There is a whole micro industry of vote buying and comment spamming, ad firms or companies will pay such groups to add certain messaging to their comment spam. You can actually make a quick buck by selling any old Reddit accounts to such groups.
Shit you can get paid?
Yep, Reddit continues to shit itself.
They were failing pretty miserably back when I was a visitor. Hopefully that's still the case, though I imagine they will gain more and more traction as the reddit brain drain continues.
Before or after IPO?
Yes
And they get pretty obvious in big subs like /cars and /gaming. So many posting opinions like car magazines or gaming reviews do - point out nit-picky negatives that are relatively inconsequential to the product, softball other criticism, but give an overall decent review. Heaven help you if you actually voice an opinion critical of the object, because you’re allowed to have that opinion as an individual, that doesn’t toe the line and you get instant downvotes.
I cannot imagine using Reddit ever again beyond trying to cheat Google. It's so shitty.
It's behind a paywall
the rest are just regular trolls
Seen this post over and over. This is not a new study at that point
New study: 15% of Lemmy posts are studies about 15% of all Reddit content
:D
Portillos bots would camp on the Chicagofood sub and Stan about adding cheese sauce to everything and to make sure to save room for the chocolate cake. Nobody irl from the area would hype anything from that chain
