I need to preface this by saying that this evidence is from right before the blackout protest, a few weeks ago.
So it’s not fresh tea, if that’s what you’re looking for.
Nevertheless I still think it’s relevant and interesting.
Why?
Because I’ve been suspecting an astroturf campaign for a while now, especially post-blackout given the sudden and enormous influx of cookie-cutter pro-Reddit comments we saw after the blackout.
I’ve seen others have similar suspicions, but I hadn’t seen any concrete evidence for it.
Until now that is.
I’m not sure how it flew under the radar, perhaps because the evidence was posted on Reddit right before the blackout?
In any case, without further ado, below is what I’m talking about.
r/Programming is a sub who’s mod team is made up out of majority admins/ex-admins.
It’s currently blacked out, seemingly due to a combination of a rogue mod and admins being too busy to notice, but others think it was a panicky response to suppress the uncovering of the astroturfing campaign that just happened to coincide with the general blackout.
Whatever the case, r/Programming never announced anywhere they’d join in the blackout and the last top post on the sub before it went dark, is the one exposing the astroturfing campaign.
On June 11, Redditor u/ammon-jerro notices an astroturfing campaign on r/Programming, and makes a post about it.
In a comment u/ammon-jerro provided 6 examples to support his claims of there being an astroturfing campaign.
As if those examples weren’t enough, Redditor u/schauerlich went and found an account that had posted a comment containing the following verbatim:
Sorry, I am not capable of generating inappropriate or offensive content.
In addition to this, there’s something weird going on with the bot accounts that are involved in this.
Let’s look at the one that posted “Sorry, I am not capable of generating inappropriate or offensive content” as an example.
That was posted by u/Joseph_Harris2.
But if you go to https://www.reddit.com/u/Joseph_Harris2 it’ll show a “Page not Found” page with “u/Joseph_Harris2: page not found” in the upper left corner.
If you instead go to https://www.reddit.com/u/joseph_harris2 (same url, all lowercase) you’ll see the same page with the same “u/Joseph_Harris2: page not found” (notice that it’s still correctly capitalized).
So clearly Reddit knows who you’re talking about.
However it doesn’t seem that the account is simply suspended or banned because that looks different.
Nor is it deleted, because that looks like this.
And a non-existing account looks almost identical, but there’s an important difference.
The difference being in the upper left, where it doesn’t mention the username and just says “page not found”.
This weird behavior on the profile page happens with all the accounts that are brought up in the post on r/Programming in relation to the astroturfing.
Not sure what to make of it just yet, but it is strange.
The evidence is clear as day.
There has been, and perhaps still is, a pro-admin astroturfing campaign going on on Reddit with the help of ChatGPT and other such tools.
Does this prove that it’s a Reddit commissioned or even sanctioned astroturfing campaign?
No, there isn’t sufficient evidence for that at the moment.
Off course Reddit would have the best motivation for something like this, and it is at least remarkable that a mod team stacked with admins that have access to admin tools wouldn’t be able to effectively detect this and be able to prevent comments like these on a sub they moderated.
Nevertheless, that’s at best circumstantial and can’t be considered concrete evidence.
Edit: Mods, the usernames mentioned in this post (and subsequent links) are either of seemingly defunct bot accounts or of people who shed a light on this. If this is against the rules please let me know and I’ll remove references to these users on Reddit.
Wow, not only did they try to do an astroturfing job on their own site, but they also fucked it up. I don’t know why I’m shocked, they fucked everything else up lately.
On a related but different subject, did you know that even before the blackouts Reddit were paying people to make random low effort posts in various subreddits?
Have a look at this user’s posts prior to the blackouts: https://old.reddit.com/user/WelshCai/
And read this (which was posted after he got accused of being a karma farming bot), note the admin comment confirming it: https://old.reddit.com/user/WelshCai/comments/130zbw6/i_am_a_community_builder_for_reddit/
Community builders are “vetted and paid by Reddit for their time”: https://support.reddithelp.com/hc/en-us/articles/4418715794324-What-is-the-Community-Builders-Program-
Despite claiming they work with mods, the mods of those subreddits don’t seem to be aware of this, as evidenced by this post: https://www.reddit.com/r/Leeds/comments/138gi40/reddit_community_builders_please_read_details/
Who knows how many people they pay to try to influence the site?
Wow, didn’t even know this existed. What hot garbage.
Then again, like you, I don’t know why I’m surprised.
Huffman et al. straight up admitted that’s how they got Reddit off the ground, by making posts under fake accounts: https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2012/06/reddit-founders-made-hundreds-of-fake-profiles-so-site-looked-popular/
This comment from the site you linked get me very excited if the Fediverse end up being more successful because real people wanna make it better:
Indeed. The growth here seems organic to me, so hopefully that’s a good sign for our future.
Wow that thread on /r/Leeds is WILD. Why did I never hear about these “community builders”? If you read on in the comments you understand that they didn’t approach them openly, just started doing their meddling and got found out. This is a new low jesus christ.