Take this post for example: https://www.reddit.com/r/northernireland/comments/1ll6ocg/see_it_say_it_censored_kneecap_is_not_the_story/
Speaking from experience, people in Ireland are overwhelmingly pro-palestine.
There is this user in the comments: https://www.reddit.com/user/EntireCourage308/
Its a nearly year-old account, it started posting about a month ago, it made some innoculous posts, then pivoted to posting far-right misinformation in the r/northernireland subreddit.
There’s loads of other accounts just like it.
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ts a nearly year-old account, it started posting about a month ago, it made some innoculous posts, then pivoted to posting far-right misinformation in the r/northernireland subreddit.>
thats called warming up the account, and its designed to avoid the reddit ban evasion filters partially. it looks more legitimate if your “posting in a certain way”, then the sudden switch to a propaganda path/spam is always the objective for these accounts. reddit has gotten too sensitive and are catching people that do this if they dont have any anti-detection methods employed.
Berkshire Partners uses bots to boost their portfolio on Reddit
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im guessing Warren buffets investment firm.
and palintir using thier bots to train thier AI better, and produce propaganda on reddit.
Yep.
How do you tell the difference between astroturfing and regular comments? I mean, besides “it’s obvious”.
The problem is, unlike most people realize, astroturfing is rarely sourced from shill accounts like it used to be. Nor are high-karma accounts being purchased.
The issue is bots and shill accounts manipulate vote counts of posts/comments with certain positions. So, you don’t tell the difference, unless you find a way to track who is voting on Reddit content.
Regular accounts will not have all their posts/comments nuked from a certain point in time, and they’ll have comments in non-political subs mixed in.
When it’s posts you agree with, it’s honest users. When it’s posts you disagree with, it’s astroturfing.
I joke, but unfortunately that seems to be the most common metric for a lot of people. If it’s a position “no one would really support” (in their view), then support for it must be astroturfed.
Bingpot! So many people live in meme bunkers, where every issue is a binary battle between moral perfection and diabolical evil.
I remember their being a lot of users saying it’s “stealing” to block ads, especially on YouTube and you should definitely just sign up for premium.
No one would suspect anti-AI comments of being astroturf by authors and publishers - which means they could do so invisibly if they wanted to. I’m not saying they are, just that astroturfing seems like it would be easy to get away with if you pick the right forums.
Many comments all pushing the exact same sentiment.
If you know the engagement metrics for how much engagement a post needs to break into the algorithm and be recommended, you can spot them because all the astroturfed posts have x# of upvotes before real conversations start when it breaks into the mainstream
Wait. But posts on social media with a large number of comments with the same sentiment is SUPER common.
People comment without reading other comments ALL THE TIME. Just look at comments on youtube and instagram and similar sites that are not forums.
It’s actually really depressing to see, it makes you realize just how much people are not unique in their thoughts. Just how many people comment stating the obvious, almost like they are typing in metadata for the post. Or just how uncreative people are with jokes.
This is a fantastic question.
If you ask it in a UFO subreddit, you’ll be attacked. The dynamics there are totally fucked up. (Because the bots and astroturfing there is only about hiding the truth, you see.)
Accounts like this are usually taken over by right wing bots. Accounts that didnt care about politics, all of a sudden, have a huge agenda. Its just bullshit
Amusingly enough, brazen astroturfing (especially in political subs) was one of the main reasons I was looking for an alternative to Reddit and found Lemmy. Two years ago.
And it’s certainly only gotten worse since.
Do people think there is a reason this won’t happen to Lemmy eventually?
As in I genuinely don’t know if the fediverse tech helps with ai spamming - my assumption is even if it ever became a real threat to mainstream social media or big tech it would be flooded by ai bots anyways
Even with it being federated I don’t see how Lemmy could be immune to astroturfing. I’m sure there’s some already going on. Lemmy just isn’t yet popular enough to be a major target. Instances can defederate from one another but it’s trivial to create a new account on a different instance and resume turfing. I suppose the openness of Lemmy’s logs, when compared to the closed-source centralized nature of reddit, could help suss out turfers though.
extreme versions political communities, instances are likely to get spammed, so reducing that would be defederating or blocking those instances. Lemmy will eventually have to come up with more anti-botting tools to combat this.
close all registrations, become a stricter process to federate, etc. if thats ever an issue
It will definitely happen to lemmy, unless someone conceives an ingenious AI sieve beyond current human reckoning. But the bots haven’t yet come to our peaceful little commie Linux forum, and that’s something worth appreciating, in and of itself. Every day is a blessing.
Well, first off it can’t bhappen “to Lemmy” because Lemmy isn’t va site - it’s a piece of software.
It not only can and will but already has happened to individual instances. And they end up getting defederated by other instances and then either fix the problem or fade away.
And individual users can just move to other instances (or if they’re smart, just stop using or even delete their account on the problem instance and keep using their other accounts on other instances).
And through it all, the rest of the fediverse just keeps chugging along.
Which illustrates the key difference between Lemmy/Mbin/Piefed/etc. and traditional social media - the fediverse is flexible. Individual instances can and will and do come and go, and it doesn’t affect the fediverse as a whole.
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Same story. One year ago. That and stopping drinking are some of the best choices I’ve made in a long time.
I still use reddit occasionally for its smallest communities where I know I’m still interacting with humans. I assume the top posts are all bot posts with bots flaming bots in the comments. Everyone’s time is worth more than that.
Bring back the enthusiast forums that were supported by calendar and sticker sales, we didn’t know how good we had it.
I’ll only search up reddit posts on Google, and it’s almost always about a movie/show or a game I’m currently playing or looking to play.
SAME. I had been very sick and off social media during the whole exodus, so had no clue about the lemmyverse, but going back to reddit the astroturfing was sooo bad, I just had to look for alternatives.
Looked at the front page earlier today and one of the top things was an AI generated video of POC trashing NYC. Comment section was an endless chain of “democrats hate America” and “we imported the third world”.
palintir bots are also making headways into the site.
only occasionally look at reddit and yeah the push is super obvious
the “hot” section for my vpn region the other day was just the top 4 pro-regime dumps
I wonder if one of these astroturfers would be interested in purchasing my now unused account that is still in the top 1℅ of highest karma users… 🤔
I’ll take no less than $500,000. Don’t lowball me. I know what I’ve got.
Got my very old one too, lots and lots of posts & interactions, if you find a buyer i’ll give you 50% 😁
What’s the 1% threshold?
🤷♂️
But I have a few million and access to the special 1℅ sub all through comment karma alone.
Reddit should be like OnlyFans and tell you.
My account would definitely either ben in the top 50% or the lower 50%.
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Where would one go if they really wanted to do that? 🤔
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i visit BLACKHATWORLD alot just out of curiousity to see how aggressive reddit moderation was, and people were evading it.
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probably would get shadowban very quickly if it suddenly changes hands from inactivity, and it starts posting from atypical location, IP, or the behavior of the previous posting pattern was different. reddit currently is banning people quite easily, even if your acc isnt ban evading. high karma aged account seems to help agains tthat. but i read that accts created from the app and with google as the email seems to be preferred and slightly more resistant to the filters.
LOL. I wouldn’t care. I’m not going to use Reddit again and I’d have money.
I remember when we used to laugh and ignore people with these default-generated Reddit usernames… What a stupid community they’ve become. If you can’t take the few seconds to create a username, you’re not there for anything more than spamming bullshit.
“No there isn’t” -randomwords7643
I started to understand how screwed up Reddit was when I saw a front page post with like 70k upvotes on a video for a “fishing knot” that requires using both free ends of the line. Either 70k people didn’t think about that for more than one second, or it’s all bots. Tens of thousands of them.
bots, on a forum i go to , they buy hundreds if not thousands of accounts to do this.
People don’t think on social media. At least average normal people don’t.
I really think that a large percentage (far from a majority, tho) of what people see as new bot activity on social media is just a rise in “normies” using things like reddit.
Just look at all the people being fooled by ridiculous AI shit.
Yep. The astroturfing and hive mind made it easy to leave after the API debacle. Any modestly large sub pretty much made outside opinion not worth sharing. Smaller subs were still mostly ok, but even those were being overrun with reposts or people skirting the purpose of the sub trying to get karma. You couldn’t have discussions anymore, it was people posting for karma and people responding in ways to hop on karma coattails.
Agree. It’s the nastiness that goes with it as well, if you have a different opinion you get smacked down for it. It’s horrible.
