this post was submitted on 19 Dec 2023
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New Study: At Least 15% of All Reddit Content is Corporate Trolls Trying to Manipulate Public Opinion (medium.com)
submitted 8 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
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If you're paywalled, check this archive link.

What the article calls "corporate trolls" is simply astroturfing. It became rampant in Reddit; as the walled garden was unwalled, more of the organic grass has been replaced.

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[–] [email protected] 28 points 8 months ago

The studies are from 2018 and 2020 and they didn't find that 15% of the content was by corporate trolls, they found that 15% of the top 100 subreddits had posts by corporate trolls in them. 🙄

[–] [email protected] 7 points 8 months ago

This study is from 2020, but if they did the kind of approach I suspect they did, they’d just have to re-run the algorithm against later data. I don’t know what they’re doing about API requests for academics (hopefully they just grant access), but that aside it shouldn’t be too hard.

Unfortunately the linked article doesn’t link the paper (that I saw), and what they seem to think was the title of the paper is the title of a journal (which the paper probably appeared in, but I’m not going to do that kind of search on my phone).

[–] [email protected] 2 points 7 months ago

That's a very lowball figure.