Comments

• EndlessNightmare@reddthat.com ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

  I’d be surprised if it was only 15%

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  • Ep1cFac3pa1m@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

    The other 85% is non-corporate trolls trying to manipulate public opinion

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    • northendtrooper@lemmy.ca ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

      Worse. State actors to suppress the truth and push their narrative.

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    • MangoCats@feddit.it ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

      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?

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    • myfunnyaccountname@lemmy.zip ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

      Nah. It’s 10% non corporate trolls. The rest is all bots.

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    • CIA_chatbot@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

      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)

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  • TheTechnician27@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

    I don’t think we know what the actual figure is because this blog post ostensibly fabricates this alleged 2020 study.

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    • b_tr3e@feddit.org ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

      this blog post ostensibly fabricates this alleged 2020 study.

      Yeah. It’s probably corporate trolls manipulating public opinion.

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    • gedaliyah@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

      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.

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  • DaMummy@hilariouschaos.com ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

    15% of reddit is probably political, the other 85% are niche subreddits.

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    • EndlessNightmare@reddthat.com ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

      You think corpo content is limited to political subs?

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    • aeronmelon@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

      r/SFWimaginarywerewolves

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• MedicPigBabySaver@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

  Fuck Reddit and Fuck Spez.

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  • THE_GR8_MIKE@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

    Fuck the rest of the admins too while we’re at it.

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  • UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

    Image

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  • DaMummy@hilariouschaos.com ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

    Unless you’re a jailbait, then maybe don’t fuck Spez.

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    • FauxLiving@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

      Well, he was a moderator of r/jailbait

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• vpol@feddit.uk ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

  15% corporate trolls 35-45% state trolls

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  • UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ 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.

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    • MangoCats@feddit.it ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

      Those ex-military “consultant - analysts” gotta have something to do…

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    • b_tr3e@feddit.org ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

      Do we? Eh… who, exactly is us?

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  • MangoCats@feddit.it ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

    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.

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• andrewrgross@slrpnk.net ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

  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.

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  • RIotingPacifist@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

    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.

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  • cygnus@lemmy.ca ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

    I’m glad I’m not the only one - the article is sensationalistic garbage, just some rando’s blog.

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  • cibbecker@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

    We need morr people with your kind of diligence.

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  • rumba@lemmy.zip ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

    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.

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  • MangoCats@feddit.it ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

    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 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.

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• modifier@lemmy.ca ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

  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

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  • DrDickHandler@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

    You realize that Lemmy is also botted right?

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• A_Union_of_Kobolds@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

  And this is what AI is trained on

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  • TheTechnician27@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

    This blog post was plausibly written by AI. Look at the fabricated sources and the wording.

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• IWW4@lemmy.zip ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

  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.

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  • logicbomb@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

    Maybe the rest is porn.

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    • MangoCats@feddit.it ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

      Depends on how you count it: anvaka.github.io/map-of-reddit/?x=19755.639226167…

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  • Vlado@feddit.org ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

    Well the article said that the study is from 2020. So it might be a lot worse now.

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    • TheTechnician27@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

      The study is likely fabricated by this blog post from what I can find.

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  • Beacon@fedia.io ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

    It says AT LEAST 15%

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• FiniteBanjo@feddit.online ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

  Old news, its gotten a lot worse since then.

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• Hegar@fedia.io ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

  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.

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• Nickelalloy@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

  How do we keep this from not coming to Lemmy? Any ideas? 

  So far my experience here on Lemmy feels way more genuin, even encounters with people i strongly disagree with still feels real to debate with compared to reddit and even facebook.

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  • rumba@lemmy.zip ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

    We’re already offered some protection by up/down votes not mattering. Botting yourself doesn’t buy you much visibility. The real concern for me would be Mods or channel owners on the take. Just like they can’t buy themself views, we rely on mods to bury bullshit and not bury non-advertiser-friendly content. Of course, if a channel goes rogue, we just abandon it on that node and move to another. The pure nature of federation makes us less attractive to advertisers, They’re not going to want to chase dozens of smaller channels all over the place for eyeballs. Also, we’re nearly too small to care about while there are targets as big as Bluesky and Reddit around.

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• dyslexicdainbroner@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

  Not just reddit - they’re taking over all social media including lemmy

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  • Goodlucksil@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

    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.

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    • DaMummy@hilariouschaos.com ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

      When I first joined lemmy, even dessalines had to jump in a thread I was in, and banned like 10 accounts for that reason alone. I didn’t even know who he was. I have a tendency to attract some uhhh, savory characters.

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  • UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

    Lots of accounts probing the system for weakness, to be sure. But there’s just not much of an audience to manipulate. And you’ll virtually never find a Lemmy thread indexed in Google results with the high profile of a comparable Reddit thread.

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• TheTechnician27@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

  God up in fucking heaven. This person writes an entire-ass blog post about this 2020 Computers in Human Behavior study and can’t even be fucked to link it, name its authors, or even say what the title is. I cannot find this paper anywhere. I looked through all twelve 2020 issues of Computers in Human Behavior and could not find this study. I searched keywords. Nothing.

  What an obnoxious fucking dipshit and their useless fucking unsourced piece of shit screed.

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• WYLD_STALLYNS@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

  I think it’s safe to say it’s safe to say, >85% corporate trolling and public manipulation.

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• nieceandtows@programming.dev ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

  The ‘At Least’ is doing heavy lifting there.

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• happydoors@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

  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

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• Kintarian@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

  I thought Reddit was just bots talking to other bots

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  • Supervisor194@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

    All you have to do to see it is find a piece of current but generally ill-regarded media and post something negative about it. Then just sit back and watch all the totally real users flooding in to defend it and talk about how people who shit on it are only doing so for weak personal reasons, and it’s not that bad they’ve always kinda liked it etc.

    Or just go to any halfway popular sub that talks about a food item that comes in a wide variety of flavors and brands. It’s a constant parade of pictures of brands with titles like “Who has tried this stuff and loves it?” or even “I can’t stand this stuff,” with an army of totally grass-roots posters defending it as “not for everybody but I love it” - and so on and so on.

    It’s so obnoxious I can barely stand it anymore. Product subs and media subs are just worthless. I still get some traction out of niche gaming and hardware subs but that’s about it.

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• jared@mander.xyz ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

  We used to call 'em shills, and talk about pitchforks!

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• rumba@lemmy.zip ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

  So, nothing has changed in 6 years?

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• absquatulate@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

  For an article quoting a study, this one is embarrasingly short on actual references or links to the reddit subs and posts it mentions. There’s literally only a link to the 2018 study and the rest coild well be speculation.

  Now I don’t know about corporate manipulation, but what I can confirm I’ve seen is a lot of small businesses using reddit to shift opinions. For example: local rental car providers on the madeira sub. Or food retailers on my local city’s sub.

  And, more worryingly, there’s an absurd amount of political propaganda. For example the waves of accounts on my native language sub supporting absolutely everything a political party does. Or the blatant manipulation being done on conservative. Or the sudden vanishing of near all kamala-supporting accounts in the morning following american election night. It’s absolutely astounding.

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• Numinous_Ylem@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

  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.

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  • FauxLiving@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

    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.

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• nosuchanon@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

  Study: At Least 15% 90% of All Reddit Content is Corporate Trolls Trying to Manipulate Public Opinion

  Fixed.

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• Bigfish@lemmynsfw.com ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

  This must not be including the porn agencies. Would be over 90% if it were.

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• Blackfeathr@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

  I could’ve told you that.

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• JackbyDev@programming.dev ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

  Post includes weird gadget/shirt/toy

  Someone asks where it is from

  Different person says they found the link

  Congratulations on achieving advertising!

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• thedeadwalking4242@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

  14% of that is probably people trying to make AI happen

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• whitecollarcry@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

  All these posts and headlines revolving around reddit are the same as the media handling trump

  Call the bullshit exactly what it is, highlight the fact that the site is dead at least in terms as a semblance of its former self, and move forward expecting absolute shit, because the owners and mods are all shit and the content gets manipulated and watered down with a bunch of social media and moderate waffling

  It’s a fucking pissed-in pool that used to be potentially worthwhile, it’s now time to embrace the other hangouts. If you continue going to the piss pool expecting a good time then your understanding and especially require tuning

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• b_tr3e@feddit.org ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

  Scandal! Shame!

  P.S.: Buy more crap!

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• Talaraine@fedia.io ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

  and more than 15% downvoting anti-corporate content

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• FenderStratocaster@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

  and 90% of Lemmy is bots trying to pitch Linux

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  • RIotingPacifist@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

    Hey I’m a human, but have you considered letting the Lord our Savior Tux into your boot partition?

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    • FauxLiving@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

      Did someone say Linux? I use Arch, btw

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• Sgarcnl@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

  No … Not Reddit … it can’t be! It can not be!!

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