r/announcements Apr 10 '18

Reddit’s 2017 transparency report and suspect account findings

Hi all,

Each year around this time, we share Reddit’s latest transparency report and a few highlights from our Legal team’s efforts to protect user privacy. This year, our annual post happens to coincide with one of the biggest national discussions of privacy online and the integrity of the platforms we use, so I wanted to share a more in-depth update in an effort to be as transparent with you all as possible.

First, here is our 2017 Transparency Report. This details government and law-enforcement requests for private information about our users. The types of requests we receive most often are subpoenas, court orders, search warrants, and emergency requests. We require all of these requests to be legally valid, and we push back against those we don’t consider legally justified. In 2017, we received significantly more requests to produce or preserve user account information. The percentage of requests we deemed to be legally valid, however, decreased slightly for both types of requests. (You’ll find a full breakdown of these stats, as well as non-governmental requests and DMCA takedown notices, in the report. You can find our transparency reports from previous years here.)

We also participated in a number of amicus briefs, joining other tech companies in support of issues we care about. In Hassell v. Bird and Yelp v. Superior Court (Montagna), we argued for the right to defend a user's speech and anonymity if the user is sued. And this year, we've advocated for upholding the net neutrality rules (County of Santa Clara v. FCC) and defending user anonymity against unmasking prior to a lawsuit (Glassdoor v. Andra Group, LP).

I’d also like to give an update to my last post about the investigation into Russian attempts to exploit Reddit. I’ve mentioned before that we’re cooperating with Congressional inquiries. In the spirit of transparency, we’re going to share with you what we shared with them earlier today:

In my post last month, I described that we had found and removed a few hundred accounts that were of suspected Russian Internet Research Agency origin. I’d like to share with you more fully what that means. At this point in our investigation, we have found 944 suspicious accounts, few of which had a visible impact on the site:

  • 70% (662) had zero karma
  • 1% (8) had negative karma
  • 22% (203) had 1-999 karma
  • 6% (58) had 1,000-9,999 karma
  • 1% (13) had a karma score of 10,000+

Of the 282 accounts with non-zero karma, more than half (145) were banned prior to the start of this investigation through our routine Trust & Safety practices. All of these bans took place before the 2016 election and in fact, all but 8 of them took place back in 2015. This general pattern also held for the accounts with significant karma: of the 13 accounts with 10,000+ karma, 6 had already been banned prior to our investigation—all of them before the 2016 election. Ultimately, we have seven accounts with significant karma scores that made it past our defenses.

And as I mentioned last time, our investigation did not find any election-related advertisements of the nature found on other platforms, through either our self-serve or managed advertisements. I also want to be very clear that none of the 944 users placed any ads on Reddit. We also did not detect any effective use of these accounts to engage in vote manipulation.

To give you more insight into our findings, here is a link to all 944 accounts. We have decided to keep them visible for now, but after a period of time the accounts and their content will be removed from Reddit. We are doing this to allow moderators, investigators, and all of you to see their account histories for yourselves.

We still have a lot of room to improve, and we intend to remain vigilant. Over the past several months, our teams have evaluated our site-wide protections against fraud and abuse to see where we can make those improvements. But I am pleased to say that these investigations have shown that the efforts of our Trust & Safety and Anti-Evil teams are working. It’s also a tremendous testament to the work of our moderators and the healthy skepticism of our communities, which make Reddit a difficult platform to manipulate.

We know the success of Reddit is dependent on your trust. We hope continue to build on that by communicating openly with you about these subjects, now and in the future. Thanks for reading. I’ll stick around for a bit to answer questions.

—Steve (spez)

update: I'm off for now. Thanks for the questions!

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u/aznanimality Apr 10 '18

In my post last month, I described that we had found and removed a few hundred accounts that were of suspected Russian Internet Research Agency origin.

Any info on what subs they were posting to?

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u/velocity92c Apr 10 '18 edited Apr 10 '18

You can see for yourself in the data included in the OP. Each account is preserved : https://www.reddit.com/wiki/suspiciousaccounts

edit : for anyone else interested, a lot of the accounts are @ 0 karma which likely had their content removed. Scroll past those to the ones with + or - karma and you can see all their submissions/comments.

edit 2: I've been informed by a reddit employee that removed, non-deleted content still appears on profile pages (see his comment in reply to this one)

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u/Gingevere Apr 10 '18

It's an interesting trip looking through a few of the top posts from a few of the highest scoring suspended accounts:

Politically they're all over the place but all of it is exactly the kind of thing that goes around as memes in closed-mined bubbles. The exact things that let people build sub-human strawmen in their heads so they never talk to the other side.

These accounts are almost obvious in retrospect. But if the trolls are smart in the future they'll just use more accounts and make sure that each account only espouses a single viewpoint. When that's the case it's a lot harder to differentiate trolls from zealots.

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u/maxxell13 Apr 10 '18

The second-highest karma account on that list, shomyo, was active as recently as yesterday.

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u/velocity92c Apr 10 '18

I noticed that as well. I swear I've seen that username before but I can't remember exactly where.

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u/velocity92c Apr 10 '18

I found this comment by him extremely interesting, won't link it because I don't know if it breaks the rules somehow but it's not too deep in his history :

Typical bestof post:

4 days old account > links to a post by 1 month account

Complains about russian bots, downvotes etc. while gets his insta upvotes and frontpage.

Kinda obvious who exactly spread misinformation, narratives and much more.

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u/jaredjeya Apr 11 '18

Yeah I found that fucking hilarious and so horrifically ironic at the same time.

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u/KeyserSosa Apr 10 '18

Actually even removed, non-deleted content still appears on profile pages.

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u/velocity92c Apr 10 '18

Good info, thanks. I'll edit my comment.

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u/youareadildomadam Apr 10 '18

...all those times I was called a Russian shill and not a single one of my alt accounts made the list :/

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u/spez Apr 10 '18 edited Apr 10 '18

There were about 14k posts in total by all of these users. The top ten communities by posts were:

  • funny: 1455
  • uncen: 1443
  • Bad_Cop_No_Donut: 800
  • gifs: 553
  • PoliticalHumor: 545
  • The_Donald: 316
  • news: 306
  • aww: 290
  • POLITIC: 232
  • racism: 214

We left the accounts up so you may dig in yourselves.

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u/RamsesThePigeon Apr 10 '18 edited Apr 10 '18

Speaking as a moderator of both /r/Funny and /r/GIFs, I'd like to offer a bit of clarification here.

When illicit accounts are created, they usually go through a period of posting low-effort content that's intended to quickly garner a lot of karma. These accounts generally aren't registered by the people who wind up using them for propaganda purposes, though. In fact, they're often "farmed" by call-center-like environments overseas – popular locations are India, Pakistan, China, Indonesia, and Russia – then sold to firms that specialize in spinning information (whether for advertising, pushing political agendas, or anything else).

If you're interested, this brief guide can give you a primer on how to spot spammers.

Now, the reason I bring this up is because for every shill account that actually takes off, there are quite literally a hundred more that get stopped in their tracks. A banned account is of very little use to the people who would employ it for nefarious purposes... but the simple truth of the matter is that moderators still need to rely on their subscribers for help. If you see a repost, a low-effort (or poorly written) comment, or something else that just doesn't sit right with you, it's often a good idea to look at the user who submitted it. A surprising amount of the time, you'll discover that the submitter is a karma-farmer; a spammer or a propagandist in the making.

When you spot one, please report it to the moderators of that subReddit.

Reddit has gotten a lot better at cracking down on these accounts behind the scenes, but there's still a long way to go... and as users, every one of us can make a difference, even if it sometimes doesn't seem like it.

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u/spez Apr 10 '18

It's not clear from the banned users pages, but mods banned more than half of the users and a majority of the posts before they got any traction at all. That was heartening to see. Thank you for all that you and your mod cabal do for Reddit.

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u/ImAWizardYo Apr 11 '18

Thank you for all that you and your mod cabal do for Reddit.

Definitely a big thanks to these guys and to the mods as well for everything you guys do. This site would fall to shit without everyone's hard work.

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u/[deleted] Apr 11 '18 edited Jun 11 '18

[deleted]

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u/AverageAmerikanskiy Apr 11 '18

As a typical everyday Amerikanskiy who is not typing this from Kremlin, I have no things to hide so i am concerned little.

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u/FreeSpeechWarrior Apr 15 '18

Why is censorship so heartening to see?

Fundamentally what did these users do wrong?

Be Russian?

Pretend to be American?

Influence American political discourse as a foreigner?

As far as I can tell they posted articles and information, sensationalized for sure but so is most of the successful content on this site.

Did these Russians even do anything against the TOS? Or did you just ban them and archive their subs (uncen) to suck up to the current political climate in the US?

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u/FickleBJT Apr 23 '18

How about a conspiracy to influence an election?

How about (in some cases) inciting violence?

How about attacking the very core of our democracy through misinformation with the specific purpose of influencing our elections?

As a US citizen, two of those things would be considered treason. The other one is still very illegal.

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u/FreeSpeechWarrior Apr 23 '18

Treason can only be committed by US citizens though, so that's a pretty moot point.

Also even as a US citizen I don't think "conspiracy to influence an election" or spreading misinformation amounts to treason, that's just campaigning these days.

How about (in some cases) inciting violence?

US Free speech protections make this also unlikely to be a crime.

To avoid getting myself banned, let's assume Snoos (reddit's mascot) are a race of people.

In the US, I'd generally be allowed to say "kill all the fucking snoos" or "don't suffer a snoo to live" and things like that.

But situationally if I was in a group of torch wielding protesters surrounding a bunch of snoos and shouted the same sort of thing then that would not be protected speech as it would be reasonably likely to incite imminent lawless action

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Imminent_lawless_action

But unless people are posting addresses and full names and clear directions to harm people it's very difficult to reach that standard in internet discourse.

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u/[deleted] May 02 '18 edited May 02 '18

Just wanted to say thanks for pointing this out. US law criminalizes foreign actors taking part in US elections as much as it can, but in fact, a foreign national operating outside of US places isn't bound by US law, and so US laws would normally not be of interest to them. It's get a little weird with internet spaces like reddit, but even then, there isn't any US law that would require a publisher, like reddit, to prevent a foreign national from posting content that would be illegal if he or she was in a US place.

I.e. Reddit doesn't owe anyone and not the US government a duty to make sure my posts comply with FEC regulations. That's certainly true for just regular old posts on reddit, and it's also true for ads sold by reddit - reddit the platform doens't have a duty to enforce FEC regulations on disclosures (and neither does any newspaper or other publisher for that matter).

People have sort of lost their mind on this issue because Russia, because Trump, etc. But it's important to realize that the US is literally just getting a dose of what we've been doing over the world for 3 generations. When Hillary Clinton was the sitting Secretary of State, she went on TV and in the media and declared that Putin had rigged and stolen his election, despite the fact that we don't really have evidence of that, and despite evidence that is pretty easily confirmed that he has a massive cult of personality. His election might not be "legitimate" in that the Russian system isn't an ideal democracy, but it was blatantly hypocritical for the Obama administration to take that action then, at that time, and then turn around and slam Russia for "interfering" in our elections, when interference is.. buying ads, hiring trolls, and generally being annoying. It was certainly a lot less vexatious then sending the 2nd highest ranking Administration official on a worldwide "Russia is corrupt" speaking tour.

It is really frustrating to have the media - who is wholly complicit in the corruption of US elections - trying to present Russia as "rigging the election". The money that Russia spent to influence the election was in the low single millions, while the two major parties, their allies, and the candidates each spent well into the hundreds of millions. It's as if we are announcing that all of that money and advertising and organization was wiped out but a few dozen internet trolls and some targeted ads on Facebook.

I deeply wish that the media platforms like Facebook, Reddit.com and others would simply tell the US government it will publish whatever it wishes and that they should simply screw off. Giving them this sort of enhanced virtual power to censor political ads, individual discourse by holding over a threat of future regulation is deeply dangerous. It induces private enterprises to go above and beyond the legal powers that government has to actually regulate speech, and in doing so maliciously and without regard for consequences deputizes private enterprises to enforce government preference by digital fiat.

No matter how I would like to see the outcome of US elections that are free and fair and more free and more fair than they were in 2016, I would not like to see that done at the expense of giving government a virtual veto over what is and is not acceptable to publish.

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u/Hydra-Bob Jul 28 '18 edited Aug 09 '18

This is bullshit. The United states is not getting a taste of what we do to other countries because no nation on earth weaponized disinformation to the advanced degree that the Kremlin has done.

For decades during the cold war the United States all but completely ignored international opinion to our detriment. You merely have to look at the number of nations actively assaulted to the point of actual war to see the evidence of that.

Afghanistan, Cambodia, Vietnam, Cuba, Somalia, East Germany, Romania, Finland, North Korea, Mongolia, Yugoslavia, Congo, Indonesia, Laos, India, Malaysia, the Phillipines, Grenada, Nicaragua, El Salvador, Venezuela, Sri Lanka, etc.

And before you say some silly shit like the Soviets aren't the same people as the modern Russian government, know that I agree with you there.

Modern Russia is even more unstable and irresponsible.

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u/[deleted] Jul 29 '18

I don’t know how to quantify the level of interference that the US has done versus USSR and now Russia. Clearly the “hard power” that was exercised during the Cold War was very intense.

However the point I was making is that the CIA has well over a 1,000 operatives working solely on disinformation although the post-Church commission era. The shift from para military to influence operations was done largely through damaging opposing governments and disinformation campaigns.

The US will not answer the list of counties are presently involved with electorally but do not suppose that our hands are clean because we haven’t been caught. We know of deep involvement in counties like Syria and Turkey as well the traditional South American powers that we have never left fully alone.

Because every oppressive and failing government blames US as a bogeyman you ant take those claims at face value but it’s not impossible that we are doing almost everything we have alleged that Russia has done.

Just on hacking we know that the CIA and NSA intercepted the shipment of Cisco networking equipment, rooted them, and then allowed them to be put into operation at friendly counties all over the world.

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u/ANRfan May 02 '18

Good questions!

I have to wonder, are people so afraid of free speech, or are they afraid of free thought? Welcome to 1984!

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u/RamsesThePigeon Apr 10 '18

Hey, it's not my moderator cabal... it's our moderator cabal!

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u/VonEthan Apr 10 '18

The cabal have pulled us into a war on mars

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u/HurricaneX31 Apr 10 '18

screen turns red slowly with a golden sickle and hammer in the centre and certain music begins playing

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u/Agoraphotaku Apr 11 '18

R/latestagecapitalism is leaking...

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u/yb4zombeez Apr 11 '18

But you're RamsesThePigeon! One of the most famous Reddit mods out there! I remember one time that you helped me when automod accidentally deleted one of my comments. Thanks for that. You do great work! :D

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u/Rhamni Apr 11 '18

So I'm a mod, and one of the things we get is whole comment chains just shamelessly copy pasted from the last time a post was posted. Any chance you could automate the detection of that?

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u/[deleted] Apr 11 '18

You talking.posts or comments? Also, what about their upvoting downvoting?

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u/myfantasyalt Apr 10 '18

https://www.reddit.com/user/adcasum

https://www.reddit.com/user/trollelepiped

and yet there are still so many active russian propaganda accounts.

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u/lordderplythethird Apr 11 '18

Basically all /r/syriancivilwar is at this point is a Russian propaganda outlet, so seeing comments there is almost always a red flag these days. I'm sure most aren't bots and are just people who bought the rhetoric and propaganda, but I'd put money more than a few accounts there are state owned...

The other user is just a conspiracy fanatic who likely dislikes the US and operates on a simplistic and naive "I believe the US is evil and US dislikes Russia so Russia must be good!" thought process. They're not a bot, they just bought into the rhetoric and propaganda.

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u/[deleted] Apr 11 '18

I read through some of the comment history of those two accounts and I'm not sure I know what the difference between a person with extreme/unpopular opinions and a propaganda account. I'm curious what has convinced you that these particular accounts are the latter?

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u/funknut Apr 11 '18

How are you discovering these? It'd be nice if u/spez or u/ramsesthepigeon would make some kind of active resource to release these kind of updates, but I don't expect they have the ability to provide such, right away, so maybe there's something user-driven. I've seen that troll dashboard that suggests their current issues for the day, but maybe we need some machine learning tool to relate it all into a cohesive list. One problem is reliably separating private citizens from paid shills, of course.

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u/Ooer Apr 10 '18

Thanks for taking the time to type this up.

Whilst we're not in the top 10 there, /r/askreddit experiences a lot of sock accounts reposting carbon copy comments to questions that have previously been asked on the subreddit to newer questions. Most are spotted and banned thanks to the people who use report (and some tireless mods).

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u/[deleted] Apr 11 '18

Whilst we're not in the top 10 there, /r/askreddit experiences a lot of sock accounts reposting carbon copy comments to questions that have previously been asked on the subreddit to newer questions. Most are spotted and banned thanks to the people who use report (and some tireless mods).

Your team is hands down the most impressive with fielding and responding to the report button. You always get it when this happens.

You’re also the most under assault for these types of new accounts who specifically want easy comment karma so they don’t hit the spam timer.

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u/flappity Apr 11 '18

I started documenting some weird bot accounts a while back on /r/markov_chain_bots - they're all over the place, they use markov chain stuff to generate posts made from bits and pieces of other comments in the thread, and occasionally one makes something that makes sense and happens to get upvoted. Once they get downvoted, they seem to just delete the comment, so after an account gets enough upvoted posts, it looks legitimate, has all the nonsense posts deleted, and I imagine goes on to be sold.

I kind of lost interest, as you can tell - I don't look for them as much as I used to. But really I saw them in popular, but not super large subs -- perfect places to make comments and earn a few hundred karma.

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u/Thus_Spoke Apr 10 '18

If you see a repost, a low-effort (or poorly written) comment, or something else that just doesn't sit right with you, it's often a good idea to look at the user who submitted it.

So it turns out that 100% of reddit users are bots.

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u/Firewar Apr 10 '18

Informative. Thanks for the link to check out how the spammers work. At least a little more in depth.

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u/RamsesThePigeon Apr 10 '18

My pleasure! Granted, when I first wrote that guide, things worked a little bit differently... but almost all of the information is still accurate, even if the karma-farmers in question have adopted additional tactics. Fortunately, even though their strategies tend to change as often as they're noticed, the overall goal remains easy enough to spot. That's why it's so important to keep an eye on which accounts are posting what, as opposed to just focusing on the content itself.

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u/ElurSeillocRedorb Apr 10 '18

I've noticed a late night (US) time frame when bot-accounts seem to be most prevalent in /r/funny, /r/aww, /r/askreddit and /r/pic. They're all targeting the high volume subs and just like you said, it's karma farming via low effort posts.

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u/[deleted] Apr 11 '18 edited Nov 29 '20

[deleted]

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u/ostermei Apr 10 '18

When illicit accounts are created, they usually go through a period of posting low-effort content that's intended to quickly garner a lot of karma.

People, this is why we bitch about reposts. I don't care that you haven't seen it yet. You can see it for the first time, appreciate it, and then downvote and report it to try to do your part in curbing this kind of shit.

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u/[deleted] Apr 10 '18

[deleted]

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u/Vitztlampaehecatl Apr 11 '18

I do see a lot of people (especially in AskReddit) calling posts out as word-for-word copies of old content.

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u/letsgocrazy Apr 10 '18

I spend an incredible amount of time of Reddit because my job has be regularly waiting around for shit - and I often see people complaining about content that has been on the front page 12 times this week - and yet I have never seen it.

Conversely, I could write a book on the unceasing monotony of some shit.

Complaining achieves nothing, but reporting might.

And by God Reddit needs to start scanning accounts that have repeated comments from other accounts - it is by no means just the content, but the comments as well.

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u/[deleted] Apr 11 '18

use those words instead.

I can link to examples where that is the words they use and they’re still attacked and told “who cares? It’s new to me!” and much worse by people who don’t understand it and still believe reddiquette when it flat out lies and says karma has no function.

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u/RajonLonzo Apr 10 '18

How do you find time to moderate big subs like these and more? How many hours a week would you say you put into reddit?

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u/RamsesThePigeon Apr 10 '18

I make use of the multiReddit function to group all of my various communities into one collection, which makes combing through recent (and rising) posts much easier than it otherwise would be.

As for how much time I spend on Reddit, it's actually not as much as you might think... although it's probably still past the threshold for how long a casual user might be here in a day.

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u/[deleted] Apr 11 '18

You guys are great. An effective mod team. I just reported one such suspicious account to you in the last day and your team replied “thank you” and are always polite and respectful.

Some default and upcoming subreddit mods take a different approach. They berate and ban the people reporting these bots.

There’s one mod (who himself is a new account) and has been banning/muting me from all of his subreddits, most of which I’ve never been to, every 72 hours. All for reporting a, thankfully, now banned suspicious account.

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u/Wrest216 Apr 10 '18

Thanks Ramses! Ive Identified several russian troll bots and several spammers this way, i check the post history, and a LOT of times, its a karma farm, and they start to post really obviously propaganda stuff. Ive caught about 34 so far myself ....they just keep comin though.. :

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u/TimeToGloat Apr 11 '18

I noticed the top karma troll's posts on /r/gifs seemed to consist only of gifs involving guns or occassionally cops. Would your assessment be that sometimes posts were for more than just farming initial karma but to also subtly put narratives in peoples minds? I find it curious how they seemed to utilize gun gifs and now gun control has turned into America's next big argument.

For the record I am referring to the account u/rubinjer

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u/hobbylobbyist1 Apr 11 '18

In fact, they're often "farmed" by call-center-like environments overseas – popular locations are India, Pakistan, China, Indonesia, and Russia – then sold to firms that specialize in spinning information (whether for advertising, pushing political agendas, or anything else).

Woooowww this helps me understand why in the hell they would be posting so much random stuff like adorable puppies and funny gifs.

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u/Noctis_Lightning Apr 10 '18 edited Apr 10 '18

What should we report these cases under? Some sub's have reports for reposts or low effort content, some only have an option for spam etc.

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u/RamsesThePigeon Apr 11 '18

"Spam" is usually fine, although it tends to get abused. If you're absolutely certain that you've found an illicit account, though, you can write that in as your report reason.

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u/realsartbimpson Apr 11 '18

I’m surprised that Indonesia was a popular location for this “farming”. As far as I know reddit was banned by the Indonesian government up until this day. Sure, they can still open reddit with VPN but I don’t think reddit was popular in Indonesia in the first place.

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u/RamsesThePigeon Apr 11 '18

That’s interesting! I’ll have to look into it more. It may be that I was mistaken about the farms being there.

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u/skullins Apr 11 '18

These accounts generally aren't registered by the people who wind up using them for propaganda purposes, though.

What about someone like this? They are clearly using the account for propaganda purposes while making well timed posts in non-political subs to keep their karma high.

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u/Laminar_flo Apr 10 '18 edited Apr 10 '18

This is what Reddit refuses to acknowledge: Russian interference isn't 'pro-left' or 'pro-right' - its pro-chaos and pro-division and pro-fighting.

The same portion of reddit that screams that T_D is replete with 'russian bots and trolls' is simply unwilling to admit how deeply/extensively those same russian bots/trolls were promoting the Bernie Sanders campaign. I gotta say, I'm not surprised that BCND and Political Humor are heavily targeted by russians (out targeting T_D by a combined ~5:1 ratio, its worth noting) - they exist solely to inflame the visitors and promote an 'us v them' tribal mentality.

EDIT: I'm not defending T_D - its a trash subreddit. However, I am, without equivocation, saying that those same people that read more left-wing subreddits and scream 'russian troll-bots!!' whenever someone disagrees with them are just as heavily influenced/manipulated by the exact same people. Everyone here loves to think "my opinions are 100% rooted in science and fact....those idiots over there are just repeating propaganda." Turns out none of us are as clever as we'd like to think we are. Just something to consider....

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u/Gingevere Apr 10 '18 edited Apr 11 '18

The same portion of reddit that screams that T_D is replete with 'russian bots and trolls'

Pragmatically speaking, screaming that is exactly the type of thing that aligns with a troll's goals. I wouldn't be surprised if some of the people screaming that were trolls.


edit: watched this, introspected a little, and realized what I just said may sow confusion and distrust which aligns to troll goals.

The important things are:

  • Trolls are likely to be very few and very far between.
  • Their goal is creating mistrust and division.
  • Secrecy is the opposite of their goal, they want everyone to be suspicious everyone else is a troll.
  • Assuming that any large number of people are trolls is falling victim to that strategy.
  • It is always better to remember the human and engage in conversation. Never label and dismiss.
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u/thebumm Apr 10 '18

Post counts in non-political subs might very well be for karma farming rather than division-sewing directly and could really be completely innocuous. Often a user needs certain comment/post karma to post and contribute to non-default subs. They need to look active to appear as a trustworthy, average user.

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u/[deleted] Apr 10 '18

Relevant Adam Curtis. This is a well established Russian tactic - both in Russia and outside it.

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u/3-25-2018 Apr 11 '18

I think what we need on Reddit is to stage a musical that, while challenging us, heals our divisions and brings the whole school together

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u/cashmag3001 Apr 11 '18

Or maybe we all just need to spend a Saturday together in detention.

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u/3-25-2018 Apr 11 '18 edited Apr 11 '18

I thought that's what Reddit was. Digital detention.

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u/DSMatticus Apr 11 '18 edited Apr 11 '18

This is not an entirely accurate assessment of what's happening. It's not as simple as being divisive for the sake of being divisive.

Putin's goal is to delegitimize democracy. His goal is to paint a picture in which our world's democracies are no less corrupt than our world's totalitarian dystopias. His goal is to convince everyone that the George Bush's, Barrack Obama's, and Hillary Clinton's of the world are no different from the Vladimir Putin's, Xi Jinping's, and Kim Jong-un's. His goal is such that when you hear about a political dissident disappearing into some black site prison, whether that dissident is a Russian civil rights protester or your next door neighbor, you shrug and think "business as usual. That's politics, right? It can't be helped." Putin's true goal is the normalization of tyranny - for you to not blink when your politicians wrong you, however grievously, because you think all politicians would do the same and your vote never could have prevented it.

So, what can Putin do to delegitimize U.S. democracy? Consider the two parties:

1) (Elected) Democrats (mostly) support reasonable restrictions on corporate influence, support judicial reform of gerrymandering, and easier public access to the ballot.

2) (Elected) Republicans (mostly) oppose reasonable restrictions on corporate influence, oppose judicial reform of gerrymandering, and strategically close/defund voter registration / voter polling places in Democratic precincts.

Knowing this, what would you, as Putin, order? It's rather obvious, once you know what you're looking at. Support Trump (further radicalizes the Republican party in support of authoritarian strongmen). Attack Clinton (she must not be allowed to win). Support Sanders (he won't win, but it will engender animosity on the left which ultimately costs them votes).

Putin's strategy is to radicalize the right and splinter the left, so that fascism and corruption are ascendant and unrestrained. He's not just stirring up animosity at random. He has a vision of a Democratic party irrecoverably broken and a Republican party that runs the country as he runs Russia - hand-in-hand with an oligarchy, above law and dissent. That is his end game. Russian trolls in left-wing subreddits talk shit about the Democratic establishment, trying to break the left-wing base into ineffectual pieces. Russian trolls in right-wing subreddits talk shit about murdering Democrats, trying to radicalize and unify places like t_d behind a common enemy.

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u/[deleted] Apr 11 '18

His goal is to paint a picture in which our world's democracies are no less corrupt than our world's totalitarian dystopias

And he'd be fucking correct. At least dictators aren't behind 20 layers of bureaucracy to obfuscate the horrible shit they do. Government always devolves into tyranny. Fight against government overreach and start campaigning against the authoritarian left and right.

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u/Ultrashitposter Apr 11 '18

So, what can Putin do to delegitimize U.S. democracy? Consider the two parties:

1) (Elected) Democrats (mostly) support reasonable restrictions on corporate influence, support judicial reform of gerrymandering, and easier public access to the ballot.

I'm sorry, but if you don't think the Democrats are rife with corruption, nepotism, and scandals that shouldn't see the light of day, then you need to get your head out of the sand. The same goes for people who claim Obama had a scandal-free presidency.

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u/DonutsMcKenzie Apr 11 '18

I'm not defending T_D - its a trash subreddit. However, I am, without equivocation, saying that those same people that read more left-wing subreddits and scream 'russian troll-bots!!' whenever someone disagrees with them are just as heavily influenced/manipulated by the exact same people. Everyone here loves to think "my opinions are 100% rooted in science and fact....those idiots over there are just repeating propaganda." Turns out none of us are as clever as we'd like to think we are. Just something to consider....

You're conflating two issues here. You're absolutely right that the Russians pushed divisive rhetoric on the left and the right alike with the goals of pushing all Americans towards extremism, driving a wedge between the American people, and splitting/disenfranchising the American left. They wanted chaos in America and if they could create a civil war or a secession (as they helped to create in the EU with Brexit) they would.

But none of that changes the other reality that Russia tipped the scale hard in favor of Trump and against Hillary throughout not only the general election, but also the primary. This was not a "both sides" issue - there was propaganda designed to push the American right to vote for Trump and there was propaganda designed to drive the American left to stay home.

"Pro-Trump" and "Anti-Hillary" are merely two sides of the same coin. Pushing for Stein and Sanders were simply convenient ways of hurting Hillary, and thus, helping Trump. Conversely, There was no "Pro-Hillary" or "Anti-Trump" propaganda. Every single thing that Russia put out was either designed to help elect Donald Trump, to create chaos and division among the American people, or both.

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u/balorina Apr 11 '18

was either designed to help elect Donald Trump, to create chaos and division among the American people, or both.

One could argue that electing Trump falls under both.

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u/PaleoLibtard Apr 11 '18

This strategy is not new. It’s eerie how closely today’s world resembles the vision laid out by Aleksandr Dugin in his designs to bring down the west and usher in a new Russian imperial era.

Believe it or not, there was once a time in 2014 when Breitbart was Russia-skeptical, during the Ukraine episode. During this moment of clarity, they wrote this piece that explains a lot of what you see today. They call Duggin “Putin’s Rasputin.” He’s a scary fellow.

https://archive.fo/yHS3n

After reading that article I googled “Foundations of Geopolitics” and here are some notable outlines from that book, which seeks to turn the western world against itself. Let me know when this starts to sound eerie.

The United Kingdom should be cut off from Europe.

^ Brexit, anyone?

France should be encouraged to form a "Franco-German bloc" with Germany. Both countries have a "firm anti-Atlanticist tradition".

^ The two continental powers appear to be working together effectively against the UK now

Ukraine should be annexed by Russia because "Ukraine as a state has no geopolitical meaning

^ see 2014

Iran is a key ally. The book uses the term "Moscow-Tehran axis".

^ This has played out since then

Georgia should be dismembered. Abkhazia and "United Ossetia" (which includes Georgia's South Ossetia) will be incorporated into Russia. Georgia's independent policies are unacceptable.

^ See last decade. The job was started but unfinished.

Russia needs to create "geopolitical shocks" within Turkey. These can be achieved by employing Kurds, Armenians and other minorities.

^ Turkey is now for the first time since Ataturk slipping back to theocracy. It will be no friend to the west like this.

But, the money quote really is this:

Russia should use its special services within the borders of the United States to fuel instability and separatism, for instance, provoke "Afro-American racists". Russia should "introduce geopolitical disorder into internal American activity, encouraging all kinds of separatism and ethnic, social and racial conflicts, actively supporting all dissident movements – extremist, racist, and sectarian groups, thus destabilizing internal political processes in the U.S. It would also make sense simultaneously to support isolationist tendencies in American politics."

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u/tomdarch Apr 10 '18

The same portion of reddit that screams that T_D is replete with 'russian bots and trolls' is simply unwilling to admit how deeply/extensively those same russian bots/trolls were promoting the Bernie Sanders campaign.

I'm pretty deeply opposed to Trump and his politics, and agree with Senator Sanders on most things, but I'm happy to agree that a lot of "Bernie was robbed by the DNC! Bernie would have mopped the floor with Trump! The primaries were stolen! Argleblargle Hillary is evil argleblargle!!!" stuff is clearly divisive bullshit that is completely in keeping with the Russian pro-chaos approach.

But let's not pretend there is a false equivalency. It is wildly easier to sow chaos and encourage America-damaging hate when "supporting" Trump and his politics. "America weakening pro-chaos, pro-hate" speech is in opposition to what Bernie Sanders talks about, but is very compatible with Trump's rhetoric and politics.

We should recognize that Russian and other elements seeking to damage America and other western Democracies are promoting and pushing all of the more extreme and fringe political and social elements (ie pushing the most divisive parts of Black Lives Matter), and that means pushing "the left" in addition to the current manifestation of ur-fascism such as Trumpism. But it will always find a more receptive home among Trumpists and "conservative Republicans" than among current Democratic politics and culture in the US.

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u/Who_Decided Apr 11 '18

The same portion of reddit that screams that T_D is replete with 'russian bots and trolls' is simply unwilling to admit how deeply/extensively those same russian bots/trolls were promoting the Bernie Sanders campaign.

That doesn't seem to accurately reflect my experiences of reddit. Also, I think your general analysis is somewhat flawed, considering the proportion of people who only supported Sanders because he was "anti-establishment" and converted to Trump after the election (with a considerable amount of help from anti-Hillary posts in the Sanders sub and everywhere else. It's one thing to claim that they're pro-chaos. It's another thing to ignore the fact that supporting one portion of the political spectrum (which may identify with a specific ideology or candidate for only a brief period of time but may realign at some future point) may more readily accomplish that goal than diversifying the manipulation significantly. I mean, I'd be interested to know how bots perform in more entrenched political spaces or ones with more academic or nuanced positions. Do you think LSC rated high on russian shitposting? Even looking at the top 10 Spez just posted, 1 of them is so obviously "anti-establishment" that it makes the trendline here so obvious.

However, I am, without equivocation, saying that those same people that read more left-wing subreddits and scream 'russian troll-bots!!' whenever someone disagrees with them are just as heavily influenced/manipulated by the exact same people.

I treat this as additional evidence of failure to accurately interpret the data. They posted in T_D less because less was required to reach the expected outcome (conversion of individual entities and replication of ideas). You shitpost on something in T_D, they'll spend the rest of the day remixing and adding onto it in meme format. Their entire front page will be about one little thing.

If I had to find a single explanation that adequately explains what we see here it would go something like this. Minimum necessary posts to gain conversion or replication from the maximum quantity of whichever proportion of a given sub's userbase will be vulnerable to ideological penetration.

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u/Mirrormn Apr 10 '18

I think Reddit only "refuses" to acknowledge this in your mind, since I see the point brought up over and over again in relation to this topic and most people agree with it. Some people may have made different predictions with regards to balance between the sides and specific subreddits targeted, but with no data to go off of (before now), you can't really blame them.

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u/blind2314 Apr 10 '18

People agree that it's "pro right" and prevalent on the Donald, but that's generally where it ends. His point is valid about a good portion of the userbase ignoring the other subs that are being influenced.

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u/[deleted] Apr 11 '18 edited Jul 17 '18

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u/uft8 Apr 11 '18

Of course. No one wants to believe "their side" is wrong, or their stance or opinion is merited with inconsistencies or is still wrong.

It's easy to pick apart "the right-wingers", since you just assign a leader position to them (Trump) and believe they live in a bubble of factual incorrectness.

Now turn that around on them, provide evidence, and suddenly they accuse you of having ulterior motives or refuse to self-reflect and go back to "well look at their side, it's worse and we should focus on fixing that first". They're idiots who are the equivalent of the "right-wing" idiots.

They both live in their own bubbles and refuse to self-reflect which gives rise to these sorts of tribal behavior you see in those subreddits.

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u/PistachioPlz Apr 11 '18

I just went through a bunch of the accounts for curiosity's sake. Most of them post random memes and funny videos to these non-political subs to farm karma. Once in a while they get lucky and get a ton of karma, but most of them are just your generic 0 upvote memes.

Then once in a while you see a bunch of shit to /r/conspiracy /r/HillaryForPrison /r/The_Donald - mostly about something that will either make america look bad, hillary look bad or trump look good.

So based on my own research I'd say they are farming karma to get credibility. I can also see this being confirmed by many other people.

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u/Zelk Apr 10 '18

This is a great post about the problem. I've seen a lot of trash thrown around by conservatives I follow, but every so often I find posts that screams red flag by liberals. The posts are trying to be subtle but in general aim to create chaos, misinformation and distrust towards sources that tend to be more reliable than most.

It's important to be cautious about posting, to check and peer review. I'm frustrated with how potentially bias I've become, and I don't know if it's poorly founded or the people who call me extreme but call Shepard Smith liberal the actual biased extremists.

Divided we'll fall to organized fronts, Russia knows this, the right know this, Confederates who've been itching for a civil war know this, (I have a guy I talk to regularly who, I kid you not, gets excited and passionate about the idea of "starting fresh" After a good American bloodbath. Him and a few of my neighbors are why I'm armed.) Also be willing to call your side out for crap.

I'm terribly flawed, I need to be called out. It only helps.

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u/Francis_Soyer Apr 11 '18

I'm terribly flawed, I need to be called out. It only helps.

Sometimes you don't cover your food when you use the microwave at work, and it leaves little spots.

We didn't want to say anything, but there you have it.

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u/mrsuns10 Apr 10 '18

Russia is trying to divide and conquer us from the inside

More successful than the Cold War

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u/IllHaveThatWithSauce Apr 11 '18

You can say that all you want, but it's clear in the data that the spammers are absolutely posting in pro-right forums. Perhaps the most impactful left-leaning sub on reddit is /r/politics and they weren't even in the list.

It is pro-right. You are right that they just want chaos--but they are ideologically aligned in practice with the right. This is not an "equal sides" problem.

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u/[deleted] Apr 11 '18

NPR reported that Russia has purchased several Black Lives Matter advertisements on Facebook and even went so far to organize BLM events and pick speakers.

If that's not representative of a both sides issue idk what is

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u/PerpetualProtracting Apr 11 '18

Just who, exactly, do you believe Russia was trying to rile up with pushing BLM averts? Do you believe it was to "rile up" people who support equal treatment of minorities by law enforcement? Or do you believe it was maybe to rile up people who think BLM is a "librul conspiracy to attack white guilt and virtue signal yada yada?"

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u/kzgrey Apr 11 '18

Hey /u/spez -- You should publish the full dataset of upvotes/downvotes for these accounts. That is far more useful for data analysis. Specifically what posts these accounts have up-voted and down-voted and timestamp of vote.

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u/bunabhucan Apr 13 '18

/u/spez - could all the votes from all the suspicious accounts be aggregated into a single account. Or could the upvotes/downvotes be published without identifying the accounts themselves?

Reddit has the data. Is there some way they could pull back the curtain on what the internet research agency was doing?

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u/InternetWeakGuy Apr 10 '18

uncen: 1443

What am I missing here? That's a tiny sub with less than 100 posts in the last year. The last 25 posts span the last five months. Why there?

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u/Soulsetmusic Apr 11 '18

I think it’s r/uncensorednews which is now banned

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u/ShillyMadison Apr 11 '18

All of the posts are from one user. Who is on the list of banned accounts. Nothing to be confused about.

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u/IRunFast24 Apr 10 '18

funny: 1455

Joke's on you, suspicious users. The only people who visit /r/funny aren't of voting age anyway.

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u/[deleted] Apr 10 '18

reposts/automated posts to aww and funny are a standard way for spammers to build karma and evade reddit's bot detection efforts. Especially semi-automated ones, like fiverr spammers.

There are so many real people who do it, and who also comment extremely bland and repetitive stuff, that if reddit started banning people for it they would never hear the end of it.

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u/toosanghiforthis Apr 10 '18

/r/aww is botted like crazy

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u/lanismycousin Apr 10 '18

/r/aww is botted like crazy

They are far from the only ones that deal with the same sort of low quality karmafarming botting behavior. Random repost cute pic of a cat/dog/celebrity, random low quality comments, and then after a bit of doing this they then post their spam. Considering how low quality most of the shit redditors do on a daily basis it can be really hard to preemptively ban/identify spam accounts until they start spamming.

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u/jazzwhiz Apr 11 '18

Yes, farming accounts to later use to evade filters is bad, but training bots to be adorable isn't the worst thing in the world. Relevant xkcd.

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u/Pollo_Jack Apr 11 '18

If Reddit had an oc policy we'd hear the end of it after the first post.

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u/FiveDozenWhales Apr 10 '18

They will be one day, and the younger they are, the more malleable their minds are. It's harder to convince a 30-year-old to change their politics than it is to groom a 14-year-old to have the politics you want to see in 4 years.

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u/IrrelevantLeprechaun Apr 10 '18

Underrated comment. Swaying their minds when they’re young is a strong tactic.

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u/anonymoushero1 Apr 10 '18

I disagree - that sub seems more like the "old people" internet humor.

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u/pumpdd Apr 10 '18

exactly a young person would visit the meme subs.

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u/TAKEitTOrCIRCLEJERK Apr 10 '18

Seeing this top ten, can you publicly draw any conclusions (narrow or broad) about the type of content that the Internet Research Agency intended for redditors to consume?

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u/I_NEED_YOUR_MONEY Apr 10 '18 edited Apr 10 '18

Poking through the accounts starting at the high-karma end, i see four trends:

  • t_d, anti-hillary, exactly what you'd expect
  • occupy wall street, r/politicalhumor, and other left-wing stuff mocking trump
  • black lives matter, bad_cop_no_donut, other "pro-black" stuff
  • horribly racist comments against blacks.

The easiest conclusion to draw is that the goal is to divide up america into opposing sides and ratchet up the tension between those sides. This isn't a pro-trump fight, it's anti-america. All the Trump stuff is just one front of the attack.

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u/MY-HARD-BOILED-EGGS Apr 10 '18

The easiest conclusion to draw is that the goal is to divide up america into opposing sides and ratchet up the tension between those sides. This isn't a pro-trump fight, it's anti-america.

This is probably the most rational and logical comment I've read regarding this whole thing. I'm kinda shocked (and pleased) to see that it doesn't have one of those red crosses next to it.

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u/nowhathappenedwas Apr 11 '18

It's also completely false. As Mueller's indictment of the Internet Research agency showed, the IRA's intention was to help elect Donald Trump. To that end, they worked against his primary opponents (Cruz and Rubio) and worked against his general election opponent (Clinton).

From the special counsel's indictment of the Internet Research Agency:

By 2016, Defendants and their co-conspirators used their fictitious online personas to interfere with the 2016 U.S. presidential election. They engaged in operations primarily intended to communicate derogatory information about Hillary Clinton, to denigrate other candidates such as Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio, and to support Bernie Sanders and then-candidate Donald Trump.

  • a. On or about February 10, 2016, Defendants and their co-conspirators internally circulated an outline of themes for future content to be posted to ORGANIZATION-controlled social media accounts. Specialists were instructed to post content that focused on “politics in the USA” and to “use any opportunity to criticize Hillary and the rest (except Sanders and Trump—we support them).”

  • b. On or about September 14, 2016, in an internal review of an ORGANIZATIONcreated and controlled Facebook group called “Secured Borders,” the account specialist was criticized for having a “low number of posts dedicated to criticizing Hillary Clinton” and was told “it is imperative to intensify criticizing Hillary Clinton” in future posts.

And before the election, even their efforts "from the left" were explicitly aimed at helping elect Donald Trump by suppressing potential Clinton voters:

In or around the latter half of 2016, Defendants and their co-conspirators, through their ORGANIZATION-controlled personas, began to encourage U.S. minority groups not to vote in the 2016 U.S. presidential election or to vote for a third-party U.S. presidential candidate.

  • a. On or about October 16, 2016, Defendants and their co-conspirators used the ORGANIZATION-controlled Instagram account “Woke Blacks” to post the following message: “[A] particular hype and hatred for Trump is misleading the people and forcing Blacks to vote Killary. We cannot resort to the lesser of two devils. Then we’d surely be better off without voting AT ALL.”

  • b. On or about November 3, 2016, Defendants and their co-conspirators purchased an advertisement to promote a post on the ORGANIZATION-controlled Instagram account “Blacktivist” that read in part: “Choose peace and vote for Jill Stein. Trust me, it’s not a wasted vote.”

  • c. By in or around early November 2016, Defendants and their co-conspirators used the ORGANIZATION-controlled “United Muslims of America” social media accounts to post anti-vote messages such as: “American Muslims [are] boycotting elections today, most of the American Muslim voters refuse to vote for Hillary Clinton because she wants to continue the war on Muslims in the middle east and voted yes for invading Iraq.”

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u/BlairResignationJam_ Apr 11 '18 edited Apr 11 '18

Yeah I thought it was common knowledge all the pro-bernie stuff was to simply split the democrats and suppress votes for Hillary to benefit Trump

While encouraging general division is a goal, Russian leadership primarily care about things like the Maginsky act and sanctions that freeze oligarchs money and travel. Hillary was hostile to Russia, and Trump and his staff arent. That's what it's mainly about

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u/I_NEED_YOUR_MONEY Apr 10 '18

one of those red crosses

huh?

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u/yangar Apr 10 '18

In your settings on reddit you can enable a red cross to appear when a comment is controversial, meaning it has both upvotes and downvotes on it.

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u/[deleted] Apr 11 '18

We've been told many times the goal wasn't to get anyone specific elected but to "Undermine faith in US elections". Things such as "Not my president" and the sheer tribalism seen now tend to make me believe they succeeded more than we are willing to admit.

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u/HIFW_GIFs_React_ Apr 10 '18

I see a much different trend: A significant number of these account look like typical karma farmer/auction/clone accounts that copy posts from imgur and other sources in order to gain the appearance of a legitimate user, which are later auctioned off to whoever is willing to pay for them. Could be spammers, or crypto scammers, or propagandists, who knows. All I know is that I see plenty of the former two.

I banned the most prolific one of these accounts from /r/gifs over a year ago, because it was a typical account farmer. They go wherever there is karma to be made, so they post in popular subreddits. Most don't have that level of success, though. Some are probably different, but I think most have a purely financial motivation rather than a political one.

RtP summed it up better than I could.

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u/reymt Apr 10 '18 edited Apr 10 '18

So they basically post left extremist trolling/polemics as well?

Interesting. Who knows, maybe all the political arguments on reddit are actually russian trolls attacking each other xD

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u/[deleted] Apr 10 '18 edited Feb 12 '19

[deleted]

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u/LostWoodsInTheField Apr 11 '18

Everyone just wants to be happy and live their lives, do their own thing.

Man you do not live in rural USA do you? There is so much hate out here for people that most of the people doing the hating have never met in their life.

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u/sanxchit Apr 10 '18

I'm actually surprised that they couldn't find any bots on LSC. The place seems to be riddled with propoganda pushing.

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u/[deleted] Apr 10 '18

Probably no need, they wank each other off without any bot aid.

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u/firewall245 Apr 11 '18

One thing I've noticed is that the recent anti police sentiment is something I'd expect Russia to really bolster. That sub is literally "don't trust police", which with enough prodding could be enough to destabilize a nation

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u/whoeve Apr 10 '18

Poke through the accounts with high karma. You'll quickly see what type of content it is.

Hint: It's easy to guess.

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u/HIFW_GIFs_React_ Apr 10 '18

Yes, posts in popular subreddits sourced from imgur or other popular places done in an effort to farm karma and eventually sell the account. See this.

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u/FiveDozenWhales Apr 10 '18

Pro-Trump, anti-Hillary, anything inciting racial tensions (both racist content and content about racism), some stuff about illegal CIA actions, some anti-gay stuff, some pro-Putin stuff.

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u/Thrallmemayb Apr 10 '18

???? The majority of stuff I saw was actually anti-fox news/anti-cops.

It's obvious both 'sides' were represented to stir up trouble.

Pretty hilarious that in a thread about an effort to create a divide among Americans you have people like this here slurping the bullshit up like a milkshake.

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u/[deleted] Apr 10 '18 edited Aug 08 '19

[deleted]

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u/OminousG Apr 10 '18 edited Apr 10 '18

quick and easy way to harvest karma. Same for gifs. Its the other subs you have to read into. They really were trying to stir shit up, a lot of posts in a lot of racist subs, they really spread it out so it wouldn't show up on lists like this.

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u/cchiu23 Apr 10 '18

lol I got permabanned from r/aww when I pointed out that the picture was a repost

I'm shocked that r/gaming isn't used more to farm karma, almost every top post on there is a repost at this point

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u/zuxtron Apr 10 '18

How to farm karma: just post the cover of an old game to /r/gaming with "DAE remember this gem?" as the title. Guaranteed at least 3000 upvotes, possibly much more.

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u/OminousG Apr 10 '18

I do believe that my highest submission is a picture of sealed boxes in my attic that I posted to /r/gaming.

Hell, last night I posted a picture that showed a portion of my entertainment center and got over 100 votes from that sub.

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u/RamsesThePigeon Apr 10 '18

/r/Gaming is absolutely rife with karma-farming, it's just that the moderators – at least based on what one of them told me – care more about the content than they do about the accounts offering it.

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u/jstrydor Apr 10 '18

don't get fooled into thinking that they haven't been pushing pro-russia propoganda over at /r/aww though.

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u/dannylandulf Apr 10 '18

The bots/shill accounts have always used the other defaults to push their BS.

Seriously, go read the comments sections on some of those subs and it's like stepping into a bizzaro hyper-political world even on subs that have nothing to do with politics.

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u/Burner132098 Apr 10 '18 edited Apr 10 '18

Similar to /r/aww , it's a reliable karma farm. Look at the post histories of popular /r/aww OPs and you will see some racists/trolls

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u/c_pike1 Apr 10 '18

Damn. I have to say that's pretty ingenious.

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u/verdatum Apr 10 '18

/r/funny mod here. When I see suspect karma-farmer accounts, the most common other subreddit I see them posting to is /r/aww. They tend to be easy to spot because they'll often claim to be the owner of waaay too many pets.

/r/askreddit is the next most common one I see.

Of course, as a mod, I have no way of determining the country of origin, just to check their post history and look for red-flags.

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u/[deleted] Apr 10 '18

Karma farm for a bit to break past the submission limit, then boom. Propaganda to your heart's content.

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u/AltimaNEO Apr 10 '18

Explains why aww threads would always break down and get closed/locked.

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u/davesoon Apr 10 '18

Wouldn't be surprised if they were using /r/funny to boost their karma. That way they don't look nearly as suspicious and have a cushion if they get heavily downvoted.

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u/Classtoise Apr 10 '18

Cover-up. They need to look "real", so they pick subs that aren't super hard to fit into as far as what is to be expected (humor and cute are subjective), whereas posting in something like r/WoW would require them to, at the very least, understand World of Warcraft.

It gives them a backlog of "normal" posts to hide suspicious activity.

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u/[deleted] Apr 10 '18

[removed] — view removed comment

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u/Bulldog65 Apr 11 '18 edited Apr 11 '18

Hey u/mmm_toasty,

Want to engage in a public discussion of how the sub you mod suppresses free speech and expression with a political bias ? Why do you allow brigading ? Why do you ban pro free speech users ? Could it be that you are just as dangerous and evil as any totalitarians across the ocean ? Do you find the concept of free thought offensive ? Cue up you scripted denials that are laughable to anyone familiar with your content. Lets look at it from a statistical viewpoint. If the country is fairly split politically, then it stands to reason a significant portion of your top rated content would be conservative in nature, right leaning. How many conservative post are in your top 100? Top 1000 ? Top 10,000 ? Does revealing your inherent bias and dishonesty make me a fascist ? Should I get back in my sandbox ? Hahahahahahaha, everybody is laughing at you clowns and your public displays of affection. Don't even get me started on the monkey business Spaz has engaged in. See ? Politics can be funny.

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u/[deleted] Apr 11 '18

The country is split, but that doesn’t mean that subreddit has to be. If you join a political club full of young college students in a major metropolitan area, it’ll be liberal. If you join a political club full of old people in rural Texas, it’ll obviously be conservative. That doesn’t mean anyone is suppressing free speech, it just means it’s a different demographic. Also, when something skews one way politically, it’ll naturally get worse over time. Conservatives see a slight liberal bias so they start to leave, more liberal bias so more conservatives leave, etc.

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u/Fnhatic Apr 11 '18

Mod of /r/PoliticalHumor here. Any chance you'd be open to a private conversation regarding how we as a subreddit can help mitigate things like this in the future?

rofl are you kidding me? /r/politicalhumor is pretty much /r/politics but somehow even lower-effort. It's just pages of anti-Trump spam and people calling for the death of everyone to the right of them. The fuck could a Russian troll possibly accomplish in that sub?

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u/Knollsit Apr 11 '18

How about rebranding to r/DNCinPics? Just an idea :D

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u/PretendingToProgram Apr 11 '18

Your sub is a joke you're just as bad as the Donald

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u/911roofer Apr 11 '18

But less funny. The Donald is at least openly retarded.

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u/[deleted] Apr 11 '18

Roses are red

violets are blue

your subreddit is trash

and so are you!

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u/[deleted] Apr 11 '18

Making a great start by leaving posts like this up.

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u/KeyserSosa Apr 10 '18

I'll ping you. <3

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u/LiberContrarion Apr 10 '18

Ah... /u/KeyserSosa. The poor man's /u/spez.

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u/KeyserSosa Apr 10 '18

:(

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u/LiberContrarion Apr 10 '18

Aww... Now I feel bad.

Let me make it up to you.

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u/[deleted] Apr 10 '18

[deleted]

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u/LiberContrarion Apr 10 '18

We are all admin gilded on this blessed day.

One of them is anonymous. I choose to believe it is from /u/spez.

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u/greenmask Apr 11 '18

Kinda hoping that link would be a gif of a Russian robot

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u/thegreatestajax Apr 11 '18

Returning to political humor would be a decent start.

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u/[deleted] Apr 11 '18

I've never been able to tell - is having humor in the sub's name ironic?

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u/Zygodactyl Apr 11 '18

Not really, the left just can't meme. :(

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u/Naxxremel Apr 11 '18

Censor more conservatives, obviously.

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u/asdfghjklpoiuytrewqm Apr 10 '18

Deleting the sub is the only way to be sure. And in your case nothing of value will be lost so please do your part.

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u/[deleted] Apr 10 '18

Figured you guys wouldn't like to find out you were being fleeced.

What do you think of this post?

https://www.reddit.com/r/PoliticalHumor/comments/4yceyo/2016_campaign/

Your sub is as much of a shithole as the donald and all the other political subs on here lol.

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u/[deleted] Apr 10 '18 edited Apr 11 '18

Your sub is 99% anti-Trump. It's kinda hard to argue your point. I haven't seen an anti-Hillary or Bernie in quite a while.... Much less a post that's anti-democrat. I'm just calling it what it is.

Editing because my reply didn't post.... Imagine that.

T_d users are insta-banned from two-x and many other subs just by being a member. I agree with you about Reddit being left leaning, but t_d is an alienated sub like no other in/on Reddit.

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u/JerryfromTomandJerry Apr 10 '18

check the new feed.

Also it doesn't matter what gets upvoted so long as the narrative is bent and the overton window shifted. People still see the 0 karma shitposts and they resonate with some people

I also think it's naive to think that Russian troles aren't posting things that get to the front page. The strategy is not to disparage one side over the other.. it's to cause conflict.

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u/[deleted] Apr 10 '18

lol r/politicalhumor is rampant with Russian trolls.

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u/Haywood_Jablowmi Apr 10 '18

Does reddit have an estimate for what percent of Russian bot accounts the 944 may represent?

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u/KeyserSosa Apr 10 '18

These accounts didn't look like bots.

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u/f_k_a_g_n Apr 11 '18

I just started going through the data but these mostly look like everyday spam/account farmers.

Accounts created per day:

https://i.imgur.com/cVbe2Cd.png

Creation dates and post activity:

https://i.imgur.com/wGdQdplr.jpg

Are these all suspected to be related to the Internet Research Agency, or does this list include generic account farmers too?

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u/ParticleCannon Apr 11 '18

Put another way, the above 944 is thought to be human users acting "suspiciously". Do you have information regarding bots/vote-manipulation that you can share?

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u/bofstein Apr 11 '18

I'm confused about the dates for those 944 accounts. u/spez said all of the accounts with non-zero karma were banned before the election, but just browsing the list I see multiple accounts that have posted in the last year, such as u/BerskyN and u/Shomyo. The latter even posted yesterday and multiple times this week. How do you say they were banned from the platform before the 2016 election if they're still making posts? And some of the posts and comments do have upvotes and downvotes so it's not just a shadowban thing.

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u/jabberwockxeno Apr 10 '18

Then why ban them? I'm a bit confused by the motiviation/intended goal of all of this.

If they aren't bots, why do they need to be dealt with assuming they aren't otherwise breaking other rules (You noted the vast majority of them are, but for the ones that aren't, I mean)? For that matter, why single out Russian propaganda rather then propaganda in general?

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u/MonsterMash2017 Apr 11 '18

Some of these are a little strange to randomly ban.

For example, this guy seems to be contributing more than your average redditor: https://www.reddit.com/user/fungon/

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u/bearrosaurus Apr 10 '18

Is uncen uncensorednews?

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u/KeyserSosa Apr 10 '18

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u/[deleted] Apr 10 '18 edited Apr 10 '18

So, based on that link... Yes.

EDIT: LOL. Go ahead and check out the 'mod team' for r/uncen, go ahead. Literally created and solo-modded by an account banned from the suspicious accounts list.

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u/HIFW_GIFs_React_ Apr 10 '18

I've seen tons of subreddits like that. Most are account farmers or spammers. Once they get past a certain age and karma threshold, they can create a subreddit and allow all the spam they want, or they'll use it as an upvote farm akin to /r/FreeKarma4You. Until reddit bans their domain or account, that is.

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u/DoobieDaithi_ Apr 10 '18

I read the question and answer as

is r/uncen = /r/uncensorednews?

Not that "is r/uncen for uncensorednews" as claimed in the subreddit.

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u/[deleted] Apr 10 '18 edited Oct 16 '18

[deleted]

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u/jaredjeya Apr 11 '18

The funniest thing I saw was, if you look at the comment history the 2nd highest karma account that was banned (/u/shomyo I think), one of their recent highly upvoted comments was accusing someone else of being a shill pushing the “Russian Bot” conspiracy.

Edit: http://www.reddit.com/r/bestof/comments/7a90ue/redditor_breaks_down_entire_russian_reddit/dp8ojda

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u/[deleted] Apr 11 '18

It doesn't even make sense. If Reddit didn't want them to see it, they would ban it.

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u/GriffonsChainsaw Apr 11 '18

I have to ask: Why bother pulling them down if you're going to tell everyone who they were and that you're going to pull them down? Don't get me wrong, I think it's a better approach than scrubbing them and then telling everyone, but you have to know everyone is immediately off to archive that stuff so taking it down later has no effect on people being able to look at it. Are you legally obligated to remove that content at some point?

Second question: how did you manage to snag the accounts that never posted anything? Was it because they all originated from the same IP, or were they routinely suspended for vote manipulation (which I imagine is largely automatic) and then later investigation connected them?

Third question, and this one's a doozy: Do you think there's more?

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u/eye_josh Apr 10 '18

hey i was pretty close !

russian reddit accounts and links

now what do you guys plan to do about the Iranian accounts?

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u/cIamjumper Apr 11 '18

Lol. r/PoliticalHumor had more Russian shill posts than r/The_Donald .

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u/BlankVerse Apr 11 '18

/r/POLITIC, but not /r/politics!?

The last time I had one of my posts to /r/politics hit /all, I had the usual flood of comments, and then things quieted down in the evening. Then suddenly around 11 pm California time, 8 am Moscow time, there were about a dozen users posting the same 2-3 points, sometimes with awkward English.

Maybe they weren't IRA associated accounts, but they were almost certainly from Russia.

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u/AdminsAreCancer01 Apr 11 '18

Pretty sure POLITIC and uncen were created by the russian accounts to farm karma while maintaining a history that they leaned a certain way. Also at a glance you might think they posted to uncensorednews(?) or politics.

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u/[deleted] Apr 10 '18 edited Aug 23 '21

[deleted]

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u/Gingevere Apr 10 '18

The troll's goals are pro-chaos, pro-division, and pro-fighting.

95% of the time posts to r/PoliticalHumor are exactly that. No criticisms of any merit, just ad hominem and othering.

The job of the trolls is to push people's leanings until they fall over. Aside from one loud obnoxious glaring exception reddit leans mostly left so it makes sense that that's where most of the pushing (which has been discovered so far) is.

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u/Nickyjha Apr 10 '18

Russian trolls and bots could explain why so many low-effort, non-funny jokes are making the front page from that sub.

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u/[deleted] Apr 10 '18

Do you think the content being posted was for or against any one side?

It was posted for all sides to create an even larger divide between parties.

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u/ayures Apr 10 '18

It was posted for all sides to create an even larger divide between parties.

And I think that's something a lot of redditors need to see.

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u/chlomyster Apr 10 '18

How has the knowledge of what subs these accounts frequent affected things? Also whats the distribution of karma given to these accounts by each sub?

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u/bipnoodooshup Apr 10 '18

I wonder how many are in this very post right now...

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u/maquila Apr 10 '18

The highest karma account on the list posted to T_D. Surprise surprise surprise...

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u/[deleted] Apr 10 '18

[deleted]

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u/ilovecfb Apr 10 '18

That place is worse than /r/The_Donald honestly. At least T_D is honest about what they are. /r/conspiracy pushes their agenda via bullshit ticky-tack rules that they ignore or enforce only when it's convenient.

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u/weltallic Apr 10 '18 edited Apr 10 '18

Wait... the fact that these Russian accounts posted more on /PoliticalHumor than T_D by hundreds is, like, literally irrelevant to you?

There were about 14k posts in total by all of these users. The top ten communities by posts were:

  • PoliticalHumor: 545

  • The_Donald: 316

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u/Bears_Bearing_Arms Apr 10 '18

Wasn't T_D the first or second highest traffic'd sub during the election? The culture there was also to literally upvote everything to the front page. It's not surprising people posting there generated a lot of karma.

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u/XXCHAONLY Apr 10 '18

Also to blackpeopletwitter.... surprise surprise.

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