That’s alarmingly low - it suggests that it doesn’t take much for any given influencing campaign. If there are fifteen discrete such campaigns in play, that’s just 1/100 of everyone. Now imagine that there’s tens of such campaigns, and the numbers look even more reasonable. Also, it’s probably cost-effective at this scale since this has been with us a while, which is terrifying.
What I want to know is: what percentage are human users that ate the
onionmetaphorical tequila worm1 and are now parroting these trolls?1. Follow me here: drink a bottle and eat the worm inside. You’re not thinking straight and did something you wouldn’t do if you had your wits about you, or maybe a friend nearby that is thinking clearly. Propaganda has a way of forcing you into a phantasm by emotional manipulation, making it easy to jam all kinds of nonsense into your head. Extending the metaphor, said propaganda also lays out how to defend your worm eating habit as though it’s totally normal to do.
I just hope that the next new study doesn’t end up being “New Study: At Least 15% of All Lemmy Content is Corporate Trolls Trying to Manipulate Public Opinion”, otherwise I would be wondering WTF is going on, is Lemmy on the way of being enshittified by Corporate Morons?
Hey, good to see you around! How is your koala community going?
Lemmy wouldn’t have that problem because we’re all too busy enjoying an ice cold Coca-Cola.
Omg the amount of sneaky coke ads I saw on that site was insane
Absolutely disgusting that someone would sell out like that. Not me, my integrity is strong like the legal protection I get from litigatenow.com, where you can sign up for a free consultation today, if you use my referral code #loveads2024
Pepsi, the choice of a new generation.
Please drink verification can now.
“McDonald’s!”
Ha, I’ve discovered your hidden advertising like I discovered the great taste of a crunchy Big Kahuna Burger.
Let’s check out some random customer opinions:
Jules W.: “Mm-hmm! This is a tasty burger!”
Marvin: “Mind-blowing!”
Ad comment in reality:
^453 u/DrJamieSmith34:
Actually fast food isn’t that bad for you. A Big Mac for example has everything you need nutrition wise. Carbs, veggies, protein.
I feel like when I run into an old friend and they tell me my ex is in rehab.
They were failing pretty miserably back when I was a visitor. Hopefully that’s still the case, though I imagine they will gain more and more traction as the reddit brain drain continues.
And this is why I use lemmy
What makes you think lemmy is immune?
Is there a chance that Lemmy admins might have more incentive to combat this than Reddit admins did?
I worry that if/when Lemmy becomes popular enough the larger communities will be targeted in the same way…
15% only? Not bad I’d say. I was expecting more like 30%+
“at least” 15%
Fair point.
And 80% of Reddit is filled with degenerates of every kind. It’s a total cesspool of excrement.
Crusty jugglers
Uh, this post is a bummer and I don’t even know if I actually believe the premise… Whatever I guess, lett’s all actually just get out of here and go get some Sprite® brand family products, you guys.
But 7up™ is made with natural ingredients, less sugar and is more limey!
My family prefers Brawndo. It has what plants crave.
Go to r/virtualreality and try to give a negative opinion about meta and the quest 3.
To be fair it’s great value hardware if you don’t care about privacy.
good thing i care about my privacy and VR makes me nauseous.
…or battery life, or comfort, or buying batteries for your controllers…
I prefer it when someone watches.
goto horny jail
I like to watch
The Meta OnlyFans partnership you’ve always wanted.
say: “i am sexually attracted ro Samsung gear vr”
the rest are just regular trolls
Before or after IPO?
Yes
I’ve said this before, but we also need to be cautious about this on lemmy and devise ways to empower mods and the community to fight back against this, I’m not entirely sure how since it’s a very complex problem
I am convinced this is already happening. One example is the endless new accounts posting ibtimes links.
There are also propoganda websites posted regularly by new accounts (especially sowing disinformation about Russia’s war on Ukraine).
Basically be wary of anything posted where it’s their first post. Often they make accounts and don’t use them for months so they look older.
I also think astroturfing is happening but at lower rate than reddit.
Like you, I have no idea how we can counter this at scale.
It might help if a poster’s number of posts and signup date were listed at the top of each post or comment. Would’t be a fix but might help weed out upsprouting autotrolls.
Yes, definitely. Perhaps highlighted if it’s one of their first few posts or the account is new.
There are a lot of subreddits which routinely award hundreds or thousands of upvotes for repetitive low value posts. … This is a cog in the well-tuned machine of new-accounts being created and matured to look ‘real’ for when they are later used for advertising / manipulation later down the line.
In the early months of a new account, it is easier to spot. Eg. If you see a post on a game subreddit with a title like “Exciting to try this game, any tips get started?”, you might click the profile and see that their entire history is a bunch of low-effort discussion starters. “Name a band from the 80s that everyone has forgotten”; “What’s the most misunderstood concept in maths?”; “What’s the most underrated (movie / band / drug / car / tourist attraction / whatever suits the topic of the subreddit)?”
A heap of threads like that, on a new account with a very generic name (adjective-noun-numbers is a common pattern); posting on a variety of subredits… is highly suspicious. But it gets harder to recognise as the account gets older and has a longer history - at which point it is ready to be sold / used for its next purpose.
The same critical thinking should apply as all other platforms.
A link posted to an article on a company’s public blog published in the last 24hrs? Almost certainly viral marketing.
I agree, this is a very complex issue. As a community we should come together and brainstorm ideas while quenching our thirst with a nice can of Diet Pepsi, the zero-sugar alternative to being thirsty!
It’s bloody difficult.
I used to mod on /r/videos years and years back. We had this one guy who was not very active as a mod in the day to day stuff, but was respected because he’d basically disappear for a few months and then reappear with a huge post in our modding sub basically going “so these are all spammers/malicious actors, here’s their profiles, the accounts were created in these waves, here’s where they’ve copied existing posts / the identical generic comments and things they use to get around our posting requirements, the targets they’ve been promoting, etc”. Just huge pages of thoroughly researched proof.
This was well before we had huge awareness of situations like Russia manipulating social media - it was usually those viral video places that buy up rights to videos and handle licensing and promotion. It’s why for a long time any licensed videos from places like viralhog etc were outright banned - they were constantly trying to manipulate reddit postings in bad faith, and even trying to socially engineer the mod team in modmail, so any videos that mentioned a licensing deal in the description were automatically banned from posting.
If we didn’t have that one guy spotting the patterns, most of it would have gotten by easily. Unfortunately he did eventually disappear for good. No clue what happened to him, hope he just cut out social media or something. But with the spamming and astroturfing stuff… Even after fighting it for years I can’t tell you what to do to counter it besides “have more of that guy”.
Very interesting
Most, if not all game reddits, product reddits, and company reddits are secretly or openly controlled by their respective corpos. Keeping communities as third party forums is a must have IMO.
I’m confused. So this is a study that shows that significant less content on reddit is bots and trolls than it seems? Like ONLY 15%?
I feel like 15% would have been a realistic number a few years ago, but nowadays you have a hard time comunicating with a real human. A bit like online customer service.
This 15% isn’t inclusive of ALL bots and trolls. Just the corporate sponsored ones.
I was also surprised, then I read how this is based on two studies, one four and and the other six years old. Now it makes sense: this was during the good old days!
The word “troll” just kinda doesn’t mean much anymore, huh.
I suppose they’re using the term troll to refer to a person engaging in behavior calculated to evoke a desired response while evading detection as doing such. It was actually used similarly in at least one academic paper back in the nineties: “Identity and deception in the virtual community”, by Judith S. Donath.
A troll is just someone who says something to provoke a (usually negative) response. They don’t have any agenda other than to entertain themselves.
A dude going into a Fortnite community to post “Fortnite sucks ass” is a troll. A dude posting propaganda to sway opinions toward a political goal/shill a product is something else.
