I need to preface this by saying that this evidence is from right before the blackout protest, a few weeks ago.
So it’s not fresh tea, if that’s what you’re looking for.
Nevertheless I still think it’s relevant and interesting.
Why?
Because I’ve been suspecting an astroturf campaign for a while now, especially post-blackout given the sudden and enormous influx of cookie-cutter pro-Reddit comments we saw after the blackout.
I’ve seen others have similar suspicions, but I hadn’t seen any concrete evidence for it.
Until now that is.
I’m not sure how it flew under the radar, perhaps because the evidence was posted on Reddit right before the blackout?
In any case, without further ado, below is what I’m talking about.
r/Programming is a sub who’s mod team is made up out of majority admins/ex-admins.
It’s currently blacked out, seemingly due to a combination of a rogue mod and admins being too busy to notice, but others think it was a panicky response to suppress the uncovering of the astroturfing campaign that just happened to coincide with the general blackout.
Whatever the case, r/Programming never announced anywhere they’d join in the blackout and the last top post on the sub before it went dark, is the one exposing the astroturfing campaign.
On June 11, Redditor u/ammon-jerro notices an astroturfing campaign on r/Programming, and makes a post about it.
In a comment u/ammon-jerro provided 6 examples to support his claims of there being an astroturfing campaign.
As if those examples weren’t enough, Redditor u/schauerlich went and found an account that had posted a comment containing the following verbatim:
Sorry, I am not capable of generating inappropriate or offensive content.
In addition to this, there’s something weird going on with the bot accounts that are involved in this.
Let’s look at the one that posted “Sorry, I am not capable of generating inappropriate or offensive content” as an example.
That was posted by u/Joseph_Harris2.
But if you go to https://www.reddit.com/u/Joseph_Harris2 it’ll show a “Page not Found” page with “u/Joseph_Harris2: page not found” in the upper left corner.
If you instead go to https://www.reddit.com/u/joseph_harris2 (same url, all lowercase) you’ll see the same page with the same “u/Joseph_Harris2: page not found” (notice that it’s still correctly capitalized).
So clearly Reddit knows who you’re talking about.
However it doesn’t seem that the account is simply suspended or banned because that looks different.
Nor is it deleted, because that looks like this.
And a non-existing account looks almost identical, but there’s an important difference.
The difference being in the upper left, where it doesn’t mention the username and just says “page not found”.
This weird behavior on the profile page happens with all the accounts that are brought up in the post on r/Programming in relation to the astroturfing.
Not sure what to make of it just yet, but it is strange.
The evidence is clear as day.
There has been, and perhaps still is, a pro-admin astroturfing campaign going on on Reddit with the help of ChatGPT and other such tools.
Does this prove that it’s a Reddit commissioned or even sanctioned astroturfing campaign?
No, there isn’t sufficient evidence for that at the moment.
Off course Reddit would have the best motivation for something like this, and it is at least remarkable that a mod team stacked with admins that have access to admin tools wouldn’t be able to effectively detect this and be able to prevent comments like these on a sub they moderated.
Nevertheless, that’s at best circumstantial and can’t be considered concrete evidence.
Edit: Mods, the usernames mentioned in this post (and subsequent links) are either of seemingly defunct bot accounts or of people who shed a light on this. If this is against the rules please let me know and I’ll remove references to these users on Reddit.
Interesting. I noticed an uptick in pro-Reddit comments that just didn’t feel “real” around the time of the blackout.
Most Reddit users are fairly irreverent so it felt really odd to see comments “toeing the company line” so obviously. At the time I just assumed they were Reddit bots/astroturfing, but tbh I didn’t really expect any better from Reddit at that point. One of the many reasons I’m here now!
Interesting to see my assumptions were correct!
Yeah I noticed that too.
It was also weird how quickly it ramped up. In early June mostly everyone agreed with the blackout, but once we got close to the blackout date, suddenly the mods “throwing a tantrum” and 3rd party app devs somehow having “vested interests” were talking points you would find in any thread? Even those unrelated to the blackout? The bot swarm definitely was site-wide and was all but subtle imo.
Re: the weird behavior of those accounts’ user pages, for what it’s worth, Reddit has always had a way for the admins to create fake skeleton accounts since the very beginning. If you look for it, there’s an interview by Spez (maybe Ohanian?) talking about how the admins had a special post submission page, with an extra field to specify a username, that would create a fake account to go along with the post.
I had a feeling there was something going when when Steve Huffman specifically called out in his interview that most comments sections were full of users ‘just wanting to go back to normal’ when the sub polls were clearly showing a different story.
Good find. Honestly though I’m just glad to be on Lemmy, knowing if absolutely all else fails I’ll just host my own server and listen into the fediverse. Can’t stop the signal
Definitely!
I’ve deleted all my Reddit accounts, but from time to time I remember seeing something on some subreddit way back when that would be useful for something I’m currently working on and try to search for it.
This time I found a rabbit hole in the process and couldn’t help but share what I found.They had a april fools thing one year where you had to guess bot or human. A lot of people thought it was a funny thing to show how bots weren’t human-like yet. Perhaps they used it to perfect their own chat bots.
They most likely used the chatGPT API, going on the comment that refused to generate inappropriate content.
Wow, not only did they try to do an astroturfing job on their own site, but they also fucked it up. I don’t know why I’m shocked, they fucked everything else up lately.
On a related but different subject, did you know that even before the blackouts Reddit were paying people to make random low effort posts in various subreddits?
Have a look at this user’s posts prior to the blackouts: https://old.reddit.com/user/WelshCai/
And read this (which was posted after he got accused of being a karma farming bot), note the admin comment confirming it: https://old.reddit.com/user/WelshCai/comments/130zbw6/i_am_a_community_builder_for_reddit/
Community builders are “vetted and paid by Reddit for their time”: https://support.reddithelp.com/hc/en-us/articles/4418715794324-What-is-the-Community-Builders-Program-
Despite claiming they work with mods, the mods of those subreddits don’t seem to be aware of this, as evidenced by this post: https://www.reddit.com/r/Leeds/comments/138gi40/reddit_community_builders_please_read_details/
Who knows how many people they pay to try to influence the site?
Wow that thread on /r/Leeds is WILD. Why did I never hear about these “community builders”? If you read on in the comments you understand that they didn’t approach them openly, just started doing their meddling and got found out. This is a new low jesus christ.
Wow, didn’t even know this existed. What hot garbage.
Then again, like you, I don’t know why I’m surprised.
Huffman et al. straight up admitted that’s how they got Reddit off the ground, by making posts under fake accounts: https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2012/06/reddit-founders-made-hundreds-of-fake-profiles-so-site-looked-popular/
This comment from the site you linked get me very excited if the Fediverse end up being more successful because real people wanna make it better:
Perfectly acceptable to me, it’s almost a necessary evil these days for people. If it isn’t popular already it will have a hard time becoming popular (unless it has a hearty budget of course). I would do the very same thing.
Indeed. The growth here seems organic to me, so hopefully that’s a good sign for our future.
Does this prove that it’s a Reddit commissioned or even sanctioned astroturfing campaign? No, there isn’t sufficient evidence for that at the moment.
I think it stands to reason though that it has to be someone with access to internal tooling at the very least. Whether I ran full-web-scraping reading/posting or private/public api bots, I could not create posts from accounts in this observed state.
Considering the evidence, a rogue admin is the best-case scenario for what is happening. It’s like arguing that a tweet from elon musk’s account doesn’t constitute sufficient evidence that elon musk posted it. I mean sure, technically, but chances are highly likely it’s true.
I mean personally I think it’s highly likely that someone at Reddit is behind it, if only because they stand to gain most of something like this and Huffman started emphasizing in interviews how the sentiment has changed in Reddit.
But out of the principle of intellectual honesty I didn’t feel comfortable blasting my personal suspicions as facts in the OP without something more concrete.
Fair enough, it just seems almost as… equally disingenuous? To suggest it’s likely anything else I think. Certainly not accusing you of that being your intent, just saying that underselling a relative certainty can lead a reader to draw the wrong conclusion from the evidence.
If have worded it like “there is no direct evidence to suggest reddit is behind it other than the motive, opportunity, and otherwise inexplicable account properties that a standard user could not replicate as far as I’m aware” that gives you the intellectual out while also selling the relative certainty we should have here
That’s fair.
I tend to separate my own opinions from the case I’m making when I don’t have something tangible to support it with, as opposed to talk more freely in comments.
In part to keep myself honest, but also in part because it’s an old habit from a former life in which I argued cases for clients that didn’t necessarily aligned with my personal opinions or beliefs.
With your background that actually makes a lot of sense. Thanks for the socratic exchange kind stranger; too bad it took the enshittification of reddit to be able to have a civil disagreement online. Long live lemmy, may your enshittification be slow.
I appreciate you affording me good faith, it is a breath of fresh air.
May your enshitification be slow as well
I wasn’t following you on the admin sock puppet until I looked at old reddit.
All I can say is 👀!
Good catch! Your post deserves to be seen by everyone!
My oh my this is so concerning, but I am not surprised
Half of reddit feels like a psyop in general lately.
