What percentage of Reddit users are bots or foreign bad actors?
What percentage of Reddit users are bots or foreign bad actors?
It probably seems weird asking this on Lemmy, but of course posting this on Reddit would get banned or taken down. Reddit doesn’t like being critical of Reddit. Anyways….
Over the last 10 years as a Reddit user I’ve believe the amount of accounts that are bots or foreign bad actors has tipped past 50%. I have no statistics to speak of, but would love if somebody did and could share.
Based purely on some of the conversations, posts, rage bait, strong ideologies, etc… I’m pretty convinced that a reasonable sample of humans could not or would not act the way they do on that platform. So often now I see posts that I feel are specifically attempting to sow discord and disagreement.
Does anyone else agree? What percent of users do you think are bots? Foreign bad actors?
Sadly, I think Reddit has no desire to find out or do anything about it. There would be no upside to them correcting their advertising numbers.
Probably a big chunk, thats why i left
"Foreign bad actors" Sigh. This is propaganda framing.
The fact that reddit is astroturfed by the US government, US actors like Hillary's campaign in 2016, etc is very well known. Reddit even did an oopsie many years ago admitting that the most active reddit city was a US air force base with influence operations located there, aka psyops, aka propaganda bots.
If it has foreign "bad actors" they don't control the narrative, they don't control the main big subs, they don't have an in with the admin team, they don't run even a large minority of bots.
If these mythical creatures people like you believe in (as a result of the US policy of always accuse your enemies of what you're doing to hide it better) to pretend that the problems are all those evil foreigners do exist they exist as grains of sand caught in a mighty torrential river of US propaganda machines and influence operations. They exist hopeless. Helpless. With no friends on the admin team unlike the US propagandists, fighting a pointless fight where they are almost certainly subject to frequent, near immediate bans after mass downvotes by controlled moderators and/or mods who just are that happy to prevent any viewpoint but the US one from existing.
Even framing your question like this is a massive pushing of US propaganda. This isn't so much a question as a weaponized trojan horse that starts from the point of view of the people who control the most bots and the narrative totally on reddit.
The only thing approaching foreign, non-US "bad actor" astroturfing and botting would have to be the zionist bot effort which is admin and main subs moderation team backed and also backed by the US government by the way who doesn't care to get upset about it or raise it as an issue and demand it stop because they're supplying weapons to that genocide.
I mean the way you state it is literally the line being pushed by US government censorship proponents who are angry any foreign voices, any voices but their own are getting through.
Your point is fair and I didn’t mean to imply that bad actors are purely foreign. There are plenty of domestic bad actors. Please excuse the “propaganda framing”.
This was my subjective opinion based on the kinds of discussions and posts I see.
A lot of it IS foreign though. I don’t know about a majority, but it’s wild.
Their point is far from fair. They have a very deliberate agenda, as do most walls of texts coming out of Lemmy.ml.
Well said.
Just because the US does it doesn't mean other countries aren't also doing it. OP said bots or foreign bad actors. Sure, a narrow scope that utilizes propaganda language, but your comment is some false dichotomy whataboutism tankie shit
For sources on foreign influence in U.S. social media, consider:
Well, he could have just said bad actors, but then the answer would be a lot higher...
Some links from reddit
https://www.reddit.com/r/LateStageCapitalism/comments/z6unyl/comment/iy4mycx/
How did I know your account is on .ml before checking?
Just an opinion from someone who has been around the internet for a long while. It wouldn't surprise me if most of the comments are bots. I remember what it was like to interact with humans, even dumb humans, and they aren't nearly as blatantly agenda-driven as commenters on what I'd call "visible social media".
There are plenty of people who have a vested interest in disrupting means of communication and organization and they are investing a great deal in "false idea proliferation".
My 0.02¢.
Oh, you asked for a percentage, in the popular subs? 80+%. In niche subs that don't affect the Overton Window? 5-30%. And yes, these numbers are favricated outward from my butt hole.
Probably on the nose.
Source: former forum user that moved to Facebook during the consolidation that moved to reddit during the monitization that moved to the fediverse during the enshitification.
I have no nostalgia about leaving sites that turn to shit or become rage bait click holes. It's just stupid time wasting media.
With you on this. As an old school netizen who watched digg enshitification that led me to reddit, then over the years was astonished about how extreme the rightward shift went... I mean the trump choo choo memes on the front page bought and paid for by Steve Bannon and other net savvy investors. It really went to absolute shit. When they banned the API it was a blessing in disguise cause no excuse to go back, especially with the lemmyverse.
TLDR fuck Reddit that platform is dead
i've likewise been moving from one social media platform onto another since things like bbs & icq were dominant; i used to believe that everything w money behind it eventually enshitified until i started seeing enshitification signs on the larger diet reddit instances like .world and lemm.ee
the diet reddit instances don't have anywhere near the same financial backing that reddit or bluesky has; yet they do the same consent manufacturing and narrative shaping that reddit, bluesky and legacy media does.
and i wonder how its going to look in the future as the enshitification drives liberals to eventually abandon their diet reddit instances once they realize that reddit or bluesky can do "general interest" better than any lemmy instance ever can.
lemmy was built for political outcasts and i suspect that the original leftists instances will always stick around and continue to form new relationships with other leftists and other instances from non-mainstream political factions; but i'm going to assume that the sheer massive size of the general-interest/diet-reddit instances (relatively speaking) will have an impact nonetheless
You take your fractional pennies and get out of here with those rough guesses I can't refute or deny!
I'd honestly be surprised if a majority of any social space was bots... However I do believe a majority of initial posts are bot generated. Especially for news based spaces. It just makes sense to plug in a bot to whatever biased news source you subscribe to and just have it post new articles every 5 minutes.
Much like the average American voter, I believe in that 50% silent users who are often forgotten. 25% active users, and that other 25% can be whatever ghosts in the system the OP is after.
My numbers are also butthole deriven.
…interact with humans, even dumb humans…
Hi, it’s me, the dumb human.
Nice try bot.
Everyone's speculating so I'll put in something concrete:
About 3 months ago, r/wholesomememes mods clamped down on karma-farm bots as hard as they could...
causing no new posts to appear for two entire days.
Hey there friends! It’s only been a few days since we started cracking down on the spam bots and excessive reposts that have been plaguing r/WholesomeMemes - and now there is nothing left! --mod
That was reposts as well. Its not like anyone was wasting their life making fresh Facebook grade memes for that that cesspit.
Why "foreign" bad actors? Reddit is a US company and has "former" CIA in high-up positions. The site is heavily astroturfed by US military and intelligence. The prevailing opinions seen on the site are extremely pro-NATO and pro-"Israel". If foreign actors are trying to influence the site, they're in the extreme minority.
The site is of course also heavily botted to fake engagement, similar to how twitter is, but i think a lot of the unpleasant people on there are real. The site caters to their hostile, antisocial behavior.
In 2013 Reddit accidentally revealed the most "Reddit Addicted City" was Eglin Air Force Base. A city with a pop of 2.8k getting +100k visits. Neat.
The 2nd most popular city from that list, Oak Brook Il, is the HQ of Elsevier, a data analytics company & DOD subcontractor.
The Research Lab at Eglin AFB was cited in a 2014 paper on how to influence social groups to converge to a "common desired state"
It's been a decade since. How far do you think they've come?
By now the Eglin AFB & other
bots ought to know to use VPNs.
Why “foreign” bad actors? Reddit is a US company and has “former” CIA in high-up positions. The site is heavily astroturfed by US military and intelligence.
i had this same thought and it's clear that posts like these are meant to frame the conversations so that it we only talk about the foreign bad actors and not the american or western bad actors.
seeing these bots and shills expand into lemmy; especially throughout .world is bone chililng to me sometimes because it makes it clear how thoroughly well this slop sells to the american people.
It was not my intention to suggest there are not "domestic bad actors". I live in America, and yes, that is a blanket term that we use to generalize countries that are antagonistic to "American values". We have plenty of domestic bad actors. I was painting with too broad of a brush and that was my bad.
If reddit and lemmy (to a lesser degree obviously) have anything in common, it's that they both desperately need perspectives from outside the US to be heard more. I mean just knowing what is meant by "foreign", shouldn't happen. Like foreign to which country? Oh of course the global hegemon again... Why is this the default on an anti-imperialist site?
I would bet the actual number of active bot accounts is probably lower than many people think. Maybe 20-30%. Those accounts are more active than humans though, maybe accounting for half of all the posts. Many of these bots arnt even proper LLMs, they are just scripts recycling generic comments, catch phrases and old memes and upvoting each other endlessly.
I suppose the spirit of the question was "volume of content" vs "volume of accounts". But there is a problem with loading a lot of content onto a singular account (from a bot detection PoV), and that is that it is easy to detect if an account is a bot if their post history is :
- Metronomic (or)
- Relentless in volume
To solve that problem (aka bot camouflage), the maintainers of said bots would use volume of accounts as a disguise mechanism. For that reason I assume that the volume of bot accounts has to scale with the volume of "pushed content" as, in my assessment.. if I were running a bot network I'd want to be sure that my most-active bots were only 50-80% as prolific as known-human accounts.. then simply distribute your content across those "strategically-limited-spam-bots".
So as a TLDR I guess what I'm saying is that the volume of accounts has to scale with the volume of influence assuming you'd want your influence to appear organic.
The meta above this would be what, account creation monitoring? It's an interesting conflict. Influence peddlers vs bot detectors.
What is gross to me is that platforms like Reddit appear to be catering to the influence peddlers. (or in the case of Facebook and Cambridge Analytica.. allying with and giving birth to said influence peddlers to the political gain of Zuckerberg's personal views on politics.)
Should one person have such power? Probably not. Explains a lot of "unexplainable" occurrences happening.. back to back to back to back to..
This is the modern incarnation of "billionaires buying newspapers" to maintain control of the narrative.
The problem is I dont think many of the accounts really care if their total account activity appears organic. They are mostly there to create volume, sometimes to puff up activity metrics, to amplify specific points and narratives, or simply to shut down conversation if it strays into the wrong topic. They know Reddit doesnt actually want to stop them, and the individual accounts rarely say anything interesting enough to justify human users taking the time to evaluate their post history.
Bots on reddit are absolutely a thing. Ever since reddit's API went private it became exclusively a for-profit venture for manufacturing consent.
If anything the foreign bots have gone down recently but national bots have gotten out of control. Given our political climate I suspect kumbaya posts of being bots more than anyone being polarizing.
foreign bad actors
There would be tons of downside if they revealed the bot count. Their website would probably crash and burn. I think it's well past 50% now. Well past.
Yeah posts getting easily 100K+ upvotes in hours, I’ll say over 70%
Pointless drivel too, stuff like "what's your favorite color, and why?".
I’m a foreign bad actor.
Oh nice! More shitstirring. 😃👍
All redditors are bad actors and 99% dont live in my country, so...
All of r/WorldNews
It has basically been taken over by the IDF
Fuck them
Define "foreign"
In another comment I was accused of being a brainwashed American, so take this for what it is, but some posts — mostly of a political nature — just seem to defy any mainstream thinking across the spectrum. Looking at some user profiles when I come across these, it seems their post history is entire based around fueling arguments, with no agenda, other than breed discontent.
Reddit is default "human advice" on what to buy, if you don't think it's crawling with companies bots as well
(but feely wise, it's sub dependent, no one will go to small sub to influence 10 people, conversely big subs are shaped both via allowed topics and first-to-post, first-to-downvote races)
It’s probably higher than that. Every time I comment on there it feels like a play with the way people act and respond. Like it’s not real, or they have a script to follow. No real person would act the way most Redditors operate.
Also important to remember that karma farming is a thing over there, alongside the circle jerk. There's thread after thread of people just saying the same shit over and over because it's guaranteed karma.
Sure this can be bots but at least when I was still active this behavior was also just karma whoring by real people. Comment fast before the thread „expires“ and become one of the top rated comments.
I see a lot of this, where it's become a mix of
- bots
- real people that comment like bots
It comes up on the Reddit moderation side where I look into an account assuming it's a spam bot but it's not. There is a certain voice or style that's similar between the two groups of accounts
Alternatively, people like to meme on the Internet.
Im not even sure how normal people post on reddit. Everytime ive ever tried to post on there in a community that isn't tiny my post is automatically removed and sent to "manual approval" which never actually happens. it baffles me how a website that is so hard to post on remains popular.
There's a few other categories to consider.
Of small niche subs I've moderated, there's maybe a 10 to 1 or higher ratio of non-active users to active. Look at the highest voted posts of all time or the last year in a sub. If the sub as 10K subscribers, the highest number of votes on any post might be 1K or so. Maybe far less.
I saw on a couple of the sub's metrics that we would consistently gain 10-20 users a day, and maybe lose 1-3 subscribers daily. But with very little increased engagement. But so we would gain sometimes 500 or even 1000 users in a month, and nothing changes. Why? Always drove me crazy.
A lot of real people start up accounts and quickly abandon them. A lot of bots sub every subreddit and do stupid things like comment when you're comment is a haiku. Every script kiddie that ever coded a broken bot that never worked right might still have 4 or 5 axcounts out there as a dead subscribers.
And let's not forget the massive amount of people with multiple accounts (hi!) and the ones with sometimes severe mental health problems, wannabe trolls, and straight up Aholes trying to evade bans. There's likely more of these out there than actual malicious and active bots.
As for actual malicious bots posting, it's likely very few, and limited to engagement on larger subs to drop parts of a larger group of talking points. But the places that normally go for that kind of thing also don't mind hiring a bunch of Nigerian 419 scammers to be real humans posting from the bot accounts sometimes.
Voters? Probably 99%. Commenters though? Like actual bots and LLMs and stuff like that? Very few, 1% rounded up, I'd think. You're much more likely to encounter humans posing as unaffiliated random people as part of their job than LLMs doing the same.
Wait? "Foreign bad actors"? You don't realize that the bad actors are domestic? Through the US government? Hence the whole "china bad" narrative.
For how much people on Lemmy who thinks "China bad" it's just as bad as reddit for domestic bad actors.
Several other comments called me out for the same thing and you are right, I didn't mean to imply that there are not domestic bad actors also.
we have both domestic and foreign threat actors, they target us for different reasons but tactics are similar.
Permanently Deleted
Thanks for your … er… um… reply? I guess? For what seems like a response to a different question than the one asked?
Permanently Deleted
Who cares?
My guess: (pure speculation)
Lemmy (edit: I mean the comment section) is probably at 25% government agents or people acting on behalf of governments including US, Russia, China, possibly other allies of the aforementioned.
Bots tho, probably few, maybe 10% or less. Most of the instances use manual applications, so hard to get bots through. You'd need to write a different "essay" for each application, also think of unique names that doesnt look bot generated.
If you look specifically in (edit: the comments section of) political threads, probably anywhere from 25% to 50% government agents.
Mainsteam social media like Reddit, probably at 25% to 50% bots pre-exodus, now it seem like 50% to 75% bots, the percentage of government agents are probably much lower, since unlike Lemmy where there are much less users, on reddit they wouldn't have the manpower to post enough comments to manipulate the discussion, but they could just use bots instead, many of those bots are probably operated by governments. And on political subreddits, these numbers will skyrocket.
Thing thing about the internet, is you have to treat it as entertainment, not real source of unbiased information, especially not a forum where any rando can sign up.
I'm gonna restate what I said in another thread:
---
I’ve come up with a system to categorize reality in different ways:
Category 1: Thoughts inside my brain formed by logics
Category 2: Things I can directly observe via vision, hearing, or other direct sensory input
Category 3: IRL Other people’s words, stories, anecdotes, in face to face conversations
Category 4: Acredited News Media, Television, Newspaper, Radio (Including Amateur Radio Conversations), Telephone, Telegrams, etc…
Category 5: The Internet
The higher the category number, means the more distant that information is, and therefore more suspicious I am.
I mean like, if a user on Reddit (or any internet fourm or social media for that matter) told me X is a valid treatment for X disease without like real evidence, I’m gonna laugh in their face (well not their face, since its a forum, but you get the idea).
Lemmy is probably at 25% government agents or people acting on behalf of governments including US, Russia, China, possibly other allies of the aforementioned.
Come on: Lemmy isn’t nearly big enough for state actors to bother with—yet. In the social media space, Lemmy is a rounding error.
The military-intelligence-industrial complex is aware of the fediverse’s existence, though:
Atlantic Council » Collective Security in a Federated World (PDF)
Many discussions about social media governance and trust and safety are focused on a small number of centralized, corporate-owned platforms that currently dominate the social media landscape: Meta’s Facebook and Instagram, YouTube, Twitter, Reddit, and a handful of others. The emergence and growth in popularity of federated social media services, like Mastodon and Bluesky, introduces new opportunities, but also significant new risks and complications. This annex offers an assessment of the trust and safety (T&S) capabilities of federated platforms—with a particular focus on their ability to address collective security risks like coordinated manipulation and disinformation.
I mean more like comments, not the total users. Total user at 25% would be a lot of man power.
Like a post with 25 comments could have at least 7 comments be a government account, and it doesn't take a lot of people. One new NSA or FSB hire can run 7 virtual machines to create Lemmy sockpuppet accounts to push whatever they want. Like... it only takes 1 out of the thousands of employees they have to run this. Lemmy is small enough to be doable.
I mean, if I wanted to troll, I could pull up 7 tor browser sessions and create accounts to post bad faith arguments, but I just don't have the energy for it.
