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.

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.

Lemmy wouldn't have that problem because we're all too busy enjoying an ice cold Coca-Cola.

Dead internet here we come!

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'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

Capitalism consumes everything.

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.

Only 15% 🤨

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.

Y combinator discussion suggests this author posts completely made up garbage:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38700636

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38627266

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

"At least" doing a lot of lifting here.

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.

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.

"At least..."

I feel like the 15% number is very, very low.

Why is Medium conflating trolls and shills?

Paid propagandists are shills, not trolls.

Key word: At least

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.

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?

Wonder what the percent of AI datasets being propaganda is

15% only? Not bad I’d say. I was expecting more like 30%+

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.

Reddit is a cesspool of shite. So glad I left and found Lemmy.

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

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.

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.

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?

First things first.

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.

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.

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?

If it's not corporations then it's PACs astroturfing. It's nothing new.

Shit you can get paid?

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.

Yep, Reddit continues to shit itself.

My first realization about this problem with reddit came about a decade ago when it became undeniable that shills flooded the discourse the moment Monsanto was mentioned.

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.

Before or after IPO?

the rest are just regular trolls

Seen this post over and over. This is not a new study at that point

It's behind a paywall

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

New study: my shock and surprise measured by a single slow blink.

And this is why I use lemmy

I feel like when I run into an old friend and they tell me my ex is in rehab.

Only going up

I'm not surprised. I get paid good money to troll online

And what percent is Russian psy-ops?

Trump could take all the Adderall available in the world and he would still be a fucking moron.

And 80% of Reddit is filled with degenerates of every kind. It's a total cesspool of excrement.

Devil's advocate here. Does not pretty much any post on the subject of politics that is not simply reporting constitute an attempt to manipulate public opinion? Are they specifically referencing nation states trying to influence public opinion?