Corporate & Trolls Estimates:
A 2020 study (re-circulated in late 2025) found that in the top 100 subreddits—the primary sources for r/all—at least 15% of communities contained content likely posted by corporate trolls or bots designed to promote specific organizations.
Bot and Spam Removals:
Reddit’s Transparency Reports consistently show that “content manipulation” and “spam” (which include paid promotional agendas) account for the vast majority of admin-level removals. For instance, in early 2024, nearly 70% of admin removals were attributed to spam.
Prevalence of Bots:
Independent estimates and user analysis suggest that 5% to 20% of users in high-visibility subreddits may be bots. These bots are frequently used by bad actors to manufacture “consensus” or “outrage” to push specific agendas.
Infiltration Experiments:
Unauthorized research in 2025 demonstrated that AI bots can successfully pose as humans and engage in “psychological manipulation” to change user views in front-page subreddits like r/changemyview without being detected.
UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world 4 weeks ago
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.
MangoCats@feddit.it 4 weeks ago
Those ex-military “consultant - analysts” gotta have something to do…
b_tr3e@feddit.org 4 weeks ago
Do we? Eh… who, exactly is us?