15% corporate trolls 35-45% state trolls
Guy from Langley spending 80 hours a week posting hundreds of SpongeBob memes to convince the Wendy’s PR company flak that we need to invade Greenland for national security reasons.
We used to call 'em shills, and talk about pitchforks!
I’d be surprised if it was only 15%
I don’t think we know what the actual figure is because this blog post ostensibly fabricates this alleged 2020 study.
Edit: But of course this post is taking off anyway because Lemmy users are soooo much more discerning than those dumbass Reddit users.
this blog post ostensibly fabricates this alleged 2020 study.
Yeah. It’s probably corporate trolls manipulating public opinion.
Quite an experience to live in fear, isn’t it? That’s what it is to be a corporate troll manipulating public opinion.
A corporate troll manipulating the public opinion by claiming corporate trolls were manipulating public opinion, that is.
The headline also does not say the same thing that the post claims!
Headline: “15% of content” --> every 6th or 7th post or comment is a corporate troll
Article: “15% of subreddits contain” --> the vast majority of subreddits contain no troll content
Actual study: [file not found]
I also cannot find any Pew research study resembling the one described. The link is a 2017 report that doesn’t mention reddit.
15% of reddit is probably political, the other 85% are niche subreddits.
r/SFWimaginarywerewolves
r/SFWimaginarywerewolves
You’re welcome. :)
You think corpo content is limited to political subs?
The other 85% is non-corporate trolls trying to manipulate public opinion
Worse. State actors to suppress the truth and push their narrative.
Better. Cat people pushing their narrative making me want a cat.
Litter boxes in classrooms confirmed!
You need a cat.
I’m doing my part! (Jk, I got banned from Reddit for sharing a Luigi meme and mentioning that historically when things are this bad, people resort to violence)
I honestly can’t stand Reddit since I can’t use Apollo anymore. The official app makes my feed like 40% adds and “suggestions,” so I just stopped using it. Pretty much the only way I see anything on Reddit now is the RDX app, and you can’t post or comment.
I’ve never used a Reddit app - just the web interfaces, almost always old.reddit.com these days. I see more like 4% advertisement, but it does vary by which sub-reddits I view. Doesn’t change the number of trolls whatsoever, but they also vary a lot depending on which sub-reddits you are in, typically the more popular, the more it is overrun with trolls.
Yeah, I don’t understand why someone would want or need to use an app for Reddit. Reddit is a website, just use a browser.
If you’re on mobile, use “desktop mode” if the mobile site starts giving you lip. Or just pre-emptively switch to it.
Nah. It’s 10% non corporate trolls. The rest is all bots.
The 2025 Superman movie hits it pretty hard with Lex Luthor’s “monkey bots.”
Considering that Blizzard had to mass-ban thousands of WoW gold farmers back in 2005, it should be no surprise whatsoever that all kinds of commercial and political “value” are being “farmed” in every major internet forum today, using every kind of cheap labor available.
How many of these trolls are now using AI to auto-generate their content?
So, nothing has changed in 6 years?
Old news, its gotten a lot worse since then.
Not just reddit - they’re taking over all social media including lemmy
Not on Lemmy - Instance admins usually either do that job or try to get people doing it out of there. And the userbase isn’t that large.
There was a hilarious study the other month showing that on r/conservative, 30-60% of posts on any given day are 2 posters, who posted every single day - except the day that ukraine strikes knocked out power in moscow.
Man, do I not miss reddit one single fucking bit. I have never once looked back since leaving in the first wave of APImageddon or whatever we’re calling that. Every post I see or article I read just validates that decision.
reddit has always been risky in one way or another. When I first joined in 2013, it was 4chan-risky Now it’s Facebook-risky, which is honestly much more ultimately harmful and nefarious than 4chan-risky, even if 4chan and facebook of today share a lot of the same trolls.
Billionaires want to herd us and all of our communications into these controlled networks for a number of nefarious reasons, but the reason that matters most to you and I right now is that they know that people need to communicate in order to coordinate, in order to stand up to oligarchy. Facebook isn’t going to let people coordinate a general strike on its platform, and neither is reddit, or youtube, or any of these totally captured networks.
We need to own our comms, which means that the fediverse itself isn’t sufficient either.
So say it with me: Meshtastic
You realize that Lemmy is also botted right?
So bots are just dandy, but I create a new account and am shadowbanned almost immediately for posting a single comment on r/Politics too soon? Cool cool cool
That was last March and how I ended up on Lemmy, so I guess maybe I should be thankful.
I create a new account and am shadowbanned almost immediately for posting a single comment on r/Politics too soon?
Completely new accounts posting in r/politics is a category of users that contains a massive amount of bots. Most subreddits have a minimum karma/account age to post specifically to mitigate some of the bot problem.
You didn’t lose anything, your voice is just going to be drown by the 20,000 LLM bots and vote manipulation accounts.
I am stunned it is only 15%. I guess the study ruled out the reposting of content.
I have seen shit echo on Reddit for over a decade.
It says AT LEAST 15%
Well the article said that the study is from 2020. So it might be a lot worse now.
The study is likely fabricated by this blog post from what I can find.
You might be right. I tried to check the “Computers in Human Behavior” to find the article, but couldn’t find it.
Maybe the rest is porn.
This must not be including the porn agencies. Would be over 90% if it were.
I think it’s safe to say it’s safe to say, >85% corporate trolling and public manipulation.
This article doesn’t really seem to validate it’s headline. I was eager to learn more about the methodology and how to better detect corporate content, but I was disappointed that they apparently just made the leap from the claim that 15% of popular subs host a non zero amount of corporate manipulation to the claim that this represents the fraction of total content.
I’m not saying this to dispute how much of the total content is corporate bots. I’m just pointing this out because I actually care about the quality of statistical claims and data science, and I hate to see my ideological allies either misusing data because they’re dumb or because they don’t have a commitment to truth.
Yeah the article is pretty trash.
15% of the top subs contain corporate propaganda becomes “15% of the subs are compromised”, “compromised” means something more than “contains propaganda” to me.
Yeah, the number is bullshit. I left before AI was truly reasonable and it was flush with corporate fanboys and vote manipulation, paid or not. Also it certainly wasn’t 15% of the subscribers, depending on the sub it might have been more or less of the active participants. Popular subs about products, hobbies, or software seemed to have a LOT of this product is just really great where for the most part noone is going to push their affinity for one corporate product over another.
I actually care about the quality of statistical claims and data science
Then you’ve gotta be having a really bad time trying to analyze subjective data about posts in internet forums with basically zero positive identification of the authors.
Even if the study authors bothered to “drill down” and check the posting history of each and every message author in a studied forum, that can be (and undoubtably frequently is) faked with boilerplate AI spam type generic responses all over a bunch of generic forums just to manufacture “validity” for the intended “high value” posts in the target areas.
If this sounds far-fetched, remember that over 20 years ago there were “gold farmers” playing WoW in China for the sole purpose of “earning” in-game value through repetitive play. Literally thousands of WoW accounts were banned just months after the game launched due to obvious farming activity.
All kinds of organizations pay for all kinds of advertising to “shape public opinion” on all kinds of topics. Only a small fraction of that advertising money gets dumped into traditional high profile channels like 30 second Superbowl spots.
We need more people with your kind of diligence.
I’m glad I’m not the only one - the article is disinformation, “fake news” in the purest sense.
I could’ve told you that.
Checking Reddit during major events it is so bizarre how hollow it is now. It feels so redacted and full of chipper bots. It takes going to special interests subreddits to get to any semblance of realness. Looking at digg today felt the same way, like a mining system for marketing analytics or product pushes
