The study found that 11% of the respondents had been contacted by a bot or troll attempting to promote a product or service. Even more concerning was the discovery that 13% of the respondents had witnessed a company manipulate public opinion on the platform.
Self reported garbage. Asking a user to self identify manipulation is ripe for abuse.
I have 2 accounts in the top 1% of reddit and neither was contacted for manipulation. Spammed? Oh, sure, ALL the time! But never the whole “Hey… can I buy your account?” kind of way.
Only 15%? More like 99%! The most recent Gaza genocide was truly an eye opener for me.
at least its such functionally, if not in actual numbers
Isn’t that just astroturfing and they’ve been doing it forever there?
This is paywalled, can you please post the text?
Either the article is really short of neither of those worked at least for me on mobile.
Same here.
Here’s the text that I got on my desktop:
spoiler
The Impact of Corporate Trolls on Reddit: A Growing Problem The rise of social media has brought about a new battleground for the spread of misinformation, manipulation of public opinion, and promotion of products and services. Reddit, one of the most popular social media platforms, has not been immune to this phenomenon.
Two significant studies, the Pew Research Center study conducted in 2018 and the Computers in Human Behavior study published in 2020, have shed light on the prevalence and impact of corporate trolls on Reddit.
Pew Research Center Study: Unveiling the Reach of Corporate Trolls The Pew Research Center study, conducted in 2018, delved into the experiences of 2,505 adult Americans who use Reddit.
The findings were alarming, revealing that a considerable portion of Reddit users had directly encountered the influence of corporate trolls.
The study found that 11% of the respondents had been contacted by a bot or troll attempting to promote a product or service. Even more concerning was the discovery that 13% of the respondents had witnessed a company manipulate public opinion on the platform.
The study’s demographic analysis further highlighted the targeted nature of corporate trolling. Younger users, particularly those aged 18–29, were significantly more likely to be contacted by corporate trolls, with 17% of them reporting such experiences, compared to only 7% of users aged 65 and over. This age-based discrepancy underscores the strategic approach of corporate trolls in engaging with a demographic that is often more susceptible to their influence.
The ebike subreddit is modded by the owners of Lunacycle. They actively remove posts about bad customer service/other issues from Lunacycle. I witnessed them name and shame some random redditor and accuse them of fraud because they posted screenshots of email correspondence that pointed out shady dealings on Luna’s part.
They use the general subreddit for electric bikes to funnel everyone into ordering from them.
I’m calling 1 year on the over/under for the introduction of blue check marks.
You mean Reddit gold check marks
You mean narwhal bacon badges.
Since before the exodus or after?
Before and worse after
I had no idea. I am well aware of Lunacycle’s toxicity from endless-sphere.com.
during the massive purge of rebellious mods, there was a huge opening for corporate shills to move into places where previous mods had kept them out. this phenomenon was widespread in many fan and specialty subs. Reddit admins were more than happy to let this happen, as corporate shills were also more than happy to be cooperative with Reddit admins.
Everything about Reddit’s most recent changes has been openly about cracking the place wide open for corporate marketing. Everything good about it was because of how genuine it was, and it was genuine because for a very long time, the attitude was to shield it against corporate influence.
That’s the only reason it became such a valuable place for search results: as the forums and blogs around the Internet went silent and corporations ravaged individual websites, reddit was a bubble of genuine interaction. It’s not just Google’s shitty algorithm, it’s also because the Internet itself got injected with shit, and reddit was a safe haven. A deeply flawed one, but still, notably less fake and corporate than the web pages around it.
That’s what gave it value.
Spez knows this. The admins have known this the whole damn time. That’s why there used to be rules against self-posting content. That’s why celebrities were only allowed to promote things in AMAS. To head off attention seeking, marketing, and corporate influence.
But the time came to make money, and they’re burning it all down to accomplish that.
I will never not share this blog because it hits the nail so cleanly on the head it sails straight down to the core of the earth:
Stop talking to each other and start buying things
It’s not just about ads, it’s about the corruption of public spaces. The death of social media is when someone tries to start making money off it at the expense of its genuine human interaction, which can not exist in that environment unmolested, and will cascade into the platform’s collapse over time. it’s enshitification, yes, but it’s also something else: “dehumanation”. The drowning of the human element of your social platform through profit seeking.
Informational tragedy. Really is.
This hurts us as consumers, patients, thinkers, feelers. :(
In a similar more minor vein, the Snowpeircer (tv show) sub was administered by the showrunners.
They were mostly subtle about it, but quietly removed lots of posts after a week or so that didn’t fit show promo.
I’m pretty sure they’ve abandoned it now that the show is in limbo.
(in voice of tts laughing god)
well, who would of fucking thought?
Facebook trolls are here so beware
DoNT TeLl ME Wut 2 dO!
deleted by creator
Tbh happy I deleted reddit
Member-only story
Medium wants me to pay them to read a story from “Homeless Romantic” who is listed as a “Ph.D. Rocket Surgeon & Aspiring Troglodyte”?
Are they fucking high?
well, whomever describes themselves in such a manner clearly is.
It’s been a wonder that site ever got traction as something credible to get info from and not just a weird mesh of editorial, blogging, and long winded shitposts…
edit: That being said, fuck reddit.
I’ve always seen it as a site for random people to shitpost. Who takes Medium seriously as a credible source?
For me, it was often a place where a lot of qualified people would essentially write blogs because hosting their own site for it would get utterly ignored by google. The last few years though I’ve got more utter morons than people who can write a good article, even for generic questions that they could straight up copy and paste from another site.
Are they fucking high?>
Yeah, probably
I was really surprised recently when I was searching for some help with a mod for a videogame and a result popped up on my duckduckgo search page for a thread on reddit about it, so I clicked it and BAM: “error, this subreddit has not been reviewed, so it is not possible to view it. Either use the app or go to home page” … wtf? I mean, this basically destroys the entire site right? I was 100% unable to view whatever content had been posted in that subreddit. So I just closed it and went somewhere else. I don’t see how reddit can even continue to exist if they don’t allow people to view the site. How did this happen?
There’s a theory that certain emails scams are so obvious and easy to spot because that acts as a self-selection mechanism. A person who sees the obvious scam and immediately recognizes it as such was probably never going to fall for it. The ones that respond in spite of all the signs tend to be easier or more lucrative targets.
I could see forcing people to download an app just to see the content as operating on a similar (but not 100% analogous) principle. The type of person who willingly installs the app to see the content (without knowing if it was worthwhile/relevant beforehand) may be exactly the type of person that they prefer to join their site. Perhaps they are easier targets for marketing, less likely to understand /complain about the ramifications of changes to the site that are user adverse, care less about privacy, etc and that makes them more lucrative?
I mean I guess that could be right, but in the end this scenario also spells doom for the company. There is no way that reddit continues to stay relevant as a meaningful place in the future. It’ll be relegated to the garbage dump where yahoo and digg and tumblr somehow still exist in zombie fashion. Sad.
I thought it must be way more.
I’m surprised it’s that low.
And a significant part of the remainder are repost bots recycling old popular posts and comments in order to farm karma, which will eventually be sold to OnlyFans spammers, political ops, and corporate shills.
I’ll see the same post on 2 or 3 subs and it will just be something I saw a year or more ago.
Maybe Reddit needs a paid verified seal, let’s make it…umm… blue to distinguish between real people and big corporate greed. /s
