New Study: At Least 15% of All Reddit Content is Corporate Trolls Trying to Manipulate Public Opinion

fossilesque@mander.xyz to Reddit@lemmy.world – 1259 points –
New Study: At Least 15% of All Reddit Content is Corporate Trolls Trying to Manipulate Public…
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Used Reddit for years. There's no way the percentage is that low.

That is probably correct. 15% of total content, but probably 70% of the content you see. Reddit has a tonne of content posted that almost nobody sees

15% of content and then fake upvoted to heaven. Could work

A chronic compulsive content-stealer creature like gallowboob might have encompassed that 15% all by himself.

We have our own version of him here on lemmy as well

We do? I see a few common posters, but no one acting like a content creator who is actually just ripping off stuff that didn't get traction.

I've seen at least 2 usernames that submit A LOT, and if you search your feed i'm sure you'll be able to spot them easily. They also comment on rising posts quite a lot and personally mod a few communities. I've not seen them repost content that doesn't get traction, but they do repost content taken from reddit

Yeah the squid and Picard but they are not bots I think just ppl with no social life whatsoever or sacrificing it so we have shit to browse o7

I won’t ever post a thing cause Reddit convinced me that it is never a super good idea. There are roving human freaks out there circling the social media like vultures looking for prey. Ugly people hiding in the shadows of the web.

A chronic compulsive content-stealer creature

Green___Cat?

You don't need much content or many comments to achieve the goal, when you have thousands of votes behind it for the good placement.

You may only need a couple hundred though. Reddit's algorithm is particularly broken and once a post is on hot it's unstoppabe.

Looking for office equipment recommendations on Reddit recently, every single thread had fake suggestions that were clearly advertiser accounts. They sounded incredibly fake like bots that pulled descriptions from Amazon, all had similar links with tracking, and all were upvoted to the top.

Right!? At least on Lemmy I can drink my Pepsi® in peace. Like for real, there's nothing better than scrolling through some funny memes with a delicious can of ice cold Pepsi®, my fellow [insert slang term; plural]!