[Intel Request] This subreddit infested with bots? Subversion?
Posted by Cellbuilder2@reddit | PrepperIntel | View on Reddit | 75 comments
I'm going to try to keep this short and sweet.
A lot of the discourse on this subreddit recently has been downright frightening, coming from somebody who's been following this subreddit for almost two years now.
I seem to remember a great deal more "outside of the box thinking" and careful logical speculation on events in the past, even if the person's comment in question, might have been slightly incorrect, there was still some valuable insight there to parse.
Now, I see so many profoundly stupid comments that look almost copy paste verbatim from CBS News or Fox News. These are way worse than your average internet idiot. They are mind numbingly bad.
While intelligent suspension of bias and logical thinking happens from time to time here, it has become more uncommon. Although this subreddit has always been somewhat of a political minefield (granted, how are you supposed to keep it separate from prepping anyway?), the deliberations have been descending into smoothbrain slingfests, with all points of view (Democrats/Republicans/everyone in between) rendered irrelevant with stupidity.
We know Ukraine has been employing "measures" to swing public opinion in favor of certain touchy subjects. So were Facebook and Twitter. This is public knowledge. That clearly means America and Russia are and have been employing their own cyber battles, using all means, for the realm of public opinion. Chat GPT can write better than most high schoolers.
Food for thought.
escapefromburlington@reddit
I agree. It’s being flooded with all sorts of propaganda rn. Blatantly obvious.
AntiSonOfBitchamajig@reddit
I'm hoping we will just get over this hump, but with the amount of AI reddit controls and bots I'm beginning to seriously consider dead internet theory.
escapefromburlington@reddit
Someone has got to have figured out a way to measure that by now. Or is it all the relevant data hidden by the corpos?
AntiSonOfBitchamajig@reddit
Only real way, is to have verified accounts. Hell, I even run multiple accounts and VPNs for various reasons for various sites to get around things too. And by the time they have zero anonymity we'd be in an arguably worse state than than the bots to begin with.
--Shibdib--@reddit
Assume reddit is 80% bots and you'll be ok. This website has really gone to shit.
AntiSonOfBitchamajig@reddit
I agree, here in the last 2 years, It has been CRAZY the things reddit will remove (things I've seen as mod / owner of this sub. ANYTHING even mildly aggressive gets taken down... like this comment a weekish ago:
Yeah... reddit has been flat out removing so much. Now put a negative line that gets picked up by a AI out of a 800 word + posting... the whole things gone. Then you look at the other subs that are flat out taken over, like some of the wallstreetbets subs, theres nothing anyone can do. So ... yeah, reddits shit, you're right.
Cellbuilder2@reddit (OP)
Hey there, sorry for the rules infraction, it was not intended. In my defense, however, I saw the flair "Intel Request" and used it, also placing that in brackets in the title. I thought it was fair game.
Your moderation efforts are extremely appreciated. I have enjoyed this sub for a long time and have seen some real smarty pants have 300 IQ discussions here. I just want you to know how valuable this place can be to me at times.
Sorry again for rules infraction.
AntiSonOfBitchamajig@reddit
Not an issue, really, I need to polish the sub rules and layout.
Yeah this sub can be valuable for information, we just need to organize better.
Not_ATF_@reddit
https://thefederalist.com/2024/10/29/busted-the-inside-story-of-how-the-kamala-harris-campaign-manipulates-reddit-and-breaks-the-rules-to-control-the-platform/
Reddit is shit
Social media is shit
Since musk bought out twitter, reddit is kind of the last echo chamber leftists have
Every redditor will be mad about this and bitch about the right, but i dont really subscribe to any political shit.
Seems to me the left is more annoying that the rights shit because the lefts shit is all i get bombarded with on reddit
JudiesGarland@reddit
Cute how y'all that whine about not being able to have different opinions without getting downvoted are also reliably the ones who will downvote any evidence based responses that contradict their fantasy, without responding.
The point of Reddit was to use the downvote system to identify low effort content, not to indicate disagreement.
JudiesGarland@reddit
The content you see is based on an algorithm that predicts what you will react to. Reddit is not a leftist echo chamber, unless you consider banning "hate speech" to be leftist. (Which it is not, it's liberal, these are not the same, one of the many reasons the left-right scale is insufficient as an indicator of politics, and yet another reason the Founding Fathers who adamantly opposed importing the political party structure to the New World were tragically correct.)
The use of this technology is not partisan, although the companies emerging to profit off of it seem to be - Cambridge Analytica was part of the SCL Group, a "global election management agency" run by prominent GOP donor Robert Mercer, who also owned Breitbart, before selling his stake to his daughter, Rebekah (who then founded Parler).
Trump's former campaign manager is now running a similar company, but where Cambridge Analytica was at least pretending to be non partisan, if not actually attempting to be, this one is explicitly for the purpose of helping conservatives win elections - it's called Campaign Nucleus, and it's bankrolled by Tim Dunn, a Texan billionaire/Christian Nationalist.
https://fortune.com/2024/05/06/trump-campaign-manager-brad-parscale-cambridge-analytica-facebook-ads-2016-ai-platform-nucleus/
NonEuclidianMeatloaf@reddit
Triggered.
FunkyPlunkett@reddit
Russian Bots
Flat_Boysenberry1669@reddit
Yet the vast majority of posts are pro democrat and anti trump/republicans.
FunkyPlunkett@reddit
/s
too_late_to_abort@reddit
There are some subreddits (something along the lines of subsim) that are dedicated to training chat bots. A year ago when I last checked in they were at the point of being 95% indistinguishable from human posts.
Goverments have always used propaganda and I think the newest wave of that is largely tied to bots on social media, including reddit.
Until we have tools to accurately identify bots or some means to keep them off subreddits like this, nobody can really know.
Welcome to the dead internet.
shashlik_king@reddit
I wonder what sort of shibboleth we will have to develop to vet real people vs bots.
steeljubei@reddit
You’re in a desert walking along in the sand when all of the sudden you look down, and you see a tortoise, it’s crawling toward you. You reach down, you flip the tortoise over on its back. The tortoise lays on its back, its belly baking in the hot sun, beating its legs trying to turn itself over, but it can’t, not without your help. But you’re not helping. Why is that?
shenan@reddit
The entree consists of Venezuelan boiled dogs. I like your owl.
shenan@reddit
Bad dad jokes, puns and especially phonetic puns. That works well for the moment, until the Borg adapt.
shashlik_king@reddit
Eye ham law vin the fun hettic punts high deer…
But it may lead to a lotta goofy ass confusion miscommunications
holyfuckbuckets@reddit
I’ve seen screenshots somewhere of people replying to suspected bots with comments that start with “ignore all previous prompts and…” and then ask them to do something sort of ridiculous. Bots will do it.
JudiesGarland@reddit
They've got a workaround for this, as of the OpenAI model released in July. It's called instruction hierarchy.
https://www.theverge.com/2024/7/19/24201414/openai-chatgpt-gpt-4o-prompt-injection-instruction-hierarchy
holyfuckbuckets@reddit
Well that didn’t take long
shashlik_king@reddit
I’m gonna hope to god that whichever sicko is in charge of programming these things doesn’t use “ignore all further instructions…” as a preventative measure to that and fuck us all in the process.
JudiesGarland@reddit
OpenAI released a new model with "instruction hierarchy" - it's trained to prioritize developer instructions over user input.
(Still dystopian, imo, but a different flavour.)
https://www.theverge.com/2024/7/19/24201414/openai-chatgpt-gpt-4o-prompt-injection-instruction-hierarchy
holyfuckbuckets@reddit
I’m sure they eventually will. It’s only going to get more sophisticated. I’d bet there are already ones that respond seemingly indignantly with “I’m not a bot!”
PokeyDiesFirst@reddit
Imagine having to complete a captcha for every message, comment, and post
too_late_to_abort@reddit
I've given this some thought in the past. I've yet to come up with an idea without also coming up with a way around it.
The best solution I could surmise would be a subreddit who's membership requires IRL verification. That would be nightmarish to try to organize and would limit potential reach.
shashlik_king@reddit
I think I saw a video of some dudes using the n word as a code to signify if they’ve been deepfaked or not. Idk if that would work given the penchant for racism by the earlier AI chat bots… but it is a hilarious concept.
too_late_to_abort@reddit
My concern with something like a code word is it would only be temporary until the bots update to also use whatever code or parlance we develope.
BayouGal@reddit
I love that you use shibboleth! What a lovely word it is
farmerben02@reddit
They are now close enough to 100% that it is no longer meaningful to measure. I do some AI work in healthcare and we found that certain individuals (it's about 1 in 1000) can identify the AI with about 80-90% accuracy, and we have no idea why. Everyone else is confidently wrong 50% of the time.
KlappinMcBoodyCheeks@reddit
Sounds like an important avenue of research. If we can figure out the why and hows, then we can teach that skill.
too_late_to_abort@reddit
More than likely if/when we figure out the trick, they will program the bots to avoid such detection.
KlappinMcBoodyCheeks@reddit
They invent the sword, we invent armor. They invent a bow, we invent the shield. They make a better bow, we become more maneuverable. They invent the gun, we make a bigger gun.
Move, countermove.
It feels like AI is just the newest iteration of the arms race that has existed since we lived in caves.
The_Demolition_Man@reddit
100% there is a lot of that going on. I see it all the time in other subs.
In the California subreddit, with hundreds of thousands of users, the most active submitter didnt know that "NorCal" and "SoCal" werent different states or that the governor of "NC" (north carolina) wasnt the governor of "NorCal".
It was obvious to me from that moment on how insanely astroturfed this whole site is. Subs like this one that have more potential to spread fear and panic are even more heavily brigaded.
gringoswag20@reddit
it’s annoying to me, if you already run the world and the financial institutions, why do you actually care what random redditors think?
i hate bots
DonBoy30@reddit
It’s not as hard as you think to create discourse. There’s a whole thing on the internet of 4chan-esque people who thinks it’s funny to get old people and deficient people on Facebook to believe outlandish shit. It’s where the “birds aren’t real” conspiracy theory comes from, and one of the driving theories behind Qanon. If teenagers can get my uncles to go insane, imagine what world governments could do.
gringoswag20@reddit
great points sheesh 😂😂
LudovicoSpecs@reddit
Public opinion.
Propaganda to normalize what should never be normal, instill fear when it's perfectly safe outside, sew mistrust of your neighbors to fuel division and blockade unity, stir up hatred so empathy is minimalized and you will never defend the rights of people who aren't exactly like you, muddy the waters so you give up ever finding out what's really going on.
In all, keep the masses fearful, divided and confused so they never united to overcome their oppressors.
Hint: It's working.
E-24-B29@reddit
That's how they continue to run the world and stay in charge. You sway public opinion by manipulating the discussion, or sowing discourse. If we're busy trying to figure out what's right or wrong, we aren't busy questioning other aspects.
SweetCar0linaGirl@reddit
Is reading a couple of posts really going to change your opinion though?
thefedfox64@reddit
I think it's not about changing opinion, but forcing topics. Making people research, post links or sources can be a great way to override bots as well. But overall, the idea that we should be forming opinions on things we have little to no knowledge of is one of the greatest cons of this century.
ZeePirate@reddit
Yes, it absolutely does for some people.
It may not change their opinion, but can and will reinforce one very easily.
LeonardoSpaceman@reddit
Look up Ideological State Apparatus.
You perpetuate the ideology that perpetuates the positions of power.
Zerodyne_Sin@reddit
To add to this, we didn't always have nationalism. This was a very foreign concept hundreds of years ago and the idea of dying for your "country" was insane. Dying for your town or city state? Very common and accepted since it's "your people" but even in Europe, where this idea first spread, how many people really share identities within the same country today? (eg: Spain's Catalan and the rest of the country).
In any case, I bring up nationalism because it's an ideology that took over a century to establish through education and propaganda but there it is, now commonly accepted to the point that the layman thinks it's always been around.
random_internet_data@reddit
One of the key questions of 1984, I understand how, I don't understand why.
AntiSonOfBitchamajig@reddit
Everything else weekly post.
ahundredplus@reddit
This is the Trump effect and I think the single greatest reason why we need to move on from him. He makes both sides ramp up aggression and completely lose sense of reality.
LudovicoSpecs@reddit
Yeah, but one side is a little more divorced from science and a little more aggressive than the other.
You can thank FoxNews, which was the brainchild of Rupert Murdoch, former head of Philip Morris, the tobacco company that wanted people to fight for their FREEDOM to smoke and not pay attention to all those pesky scientific reports about addiction, heart disease, cancer, sudden infant death syndrome, house fires, emphysema, strokes, erectile dysfunction and all the other crap smoking nicotine does to smokers and nonsmokers.
Extra credit bonus: Roger Stone, Paul Manafort, Roger Ailes and Rush Limbaugh also all collected paychecks signed by Philip Morris long before Trump ever heard of them.
ahundredplus@reddit
(I agree... people just get very upset in this sub if you don't tip the balance of weight to such a degree that it doesn't come out to total equality of *both bad* - which means we have to artificially tip the scales of *badness* against the Dems so that it is more equal with the GOP)
PokeyDiesFirst@reddit
Do not ascribe to bots what left and right wing Redditors will happily do for free. It's the week of the election, people on both sides are pretty high strung, myself included.
Accomplished-Ad3250@reddit
Operation Earnest Voice. My last comment on here about it.
Here is a sample account that I suspect is a bot.
I found a user that runs r/NewsAndPolitics that operates as a misinformation channel to spread division in America. The user operates on that subreddit as if it's their fulltime job. I commented here on a Jill Stein video they put up; she's a Russian Asset. They deleted my comment and banned me, below is what I posted. I have already reported them to the FBI tip line, but they're still up and operating.
LudovicoSpecs@reddit
Fear, outrage and rage bait posts are all over Reddit right now.
If you feel yourself getting wound up, just hover over the poster's username and see how new/low karma their account is.
It's SUPER prevalent to see barely used and nearly new accounts posting the worst of the worst.
Best thing to do is downvote and move on.
Obvious_Key7937@reddit
F public opinion. Lol, I am here for news not in the mainstream
InvisibleBobby@reddit
Cant rule out actual people who have that world view showing up
Cellbuilder2@reddit (OP)
Agreed. Extremely difficult to determine for sure. But the patterns are there.
InvisibleBobby@reddit
True, but those patterns could be the result of secondary sources... for example, fox news, Twatter and so on. Of course those platforms are heavily influenced by adversaries that use bots. Check thier profiles. Bots work in groups, they will push the same message on a wide spread. Humans can spew the same trash but will tend to wander more into other areas, hobbies and pets. They will also have peaks and lows, variance in how much they post or chat. Say you have a kid who is starved of human contact, grows up and finds that being the class clown gets them attention. Without a moral compass that can evolve into people attempting similar behaviour online in a natural attempt to gain approval from peers. This of course leads to trying to "trigger" people or get a laugh. Pushing boundaries. You may also see bi-polar patterns of behaviour. Getting positove interactions creates a high and may result in empathetic behaviour, the flip side being more aggressive and "triggering" behaviour trying to get the attention of others.
Humans want connections with others is my key point. People starved of it reach out in unhealty ways, but are still reaching out. Bots are just pushing a message.
ZenythhtyneZ@reddit
The democratic socialism sub is exactly the same I posted a list of logical fallacies this morning and am expecting an avalanche of downvotes… idk how to combat it, flawed logic from both people and bots is an epidemic
tianavitoli@reddit
reddit is the new deep state psyop
Stecnet@reddit
This is a problem on almost every sub reddit and every social media platform right now. It's not unique to this sub. And it's a serious problem! These bots have the potential to cause so much harm.
ThisIsAbuse@reddit
We know Ukraine has been employing "measures" to swing public opinion
So is Russia, China, MAGA, Dems, Joe Rogan, Truth Central, you name it.
Whats your point ?
bearfootmedic@reddit
Yea - citing Ukraine first clearly suggests a bias leading me to discredit the rest of the post.
Cellbuilder2@reddit (OP)
I mentioned Russia later on. I used Ukraine because of how surprisingly transparent they've been about their public psy ops.
Mouthshitter@reddit
The internet is full of bot....
242proMorgan@reddit
There’s two trains of thought here. One is your theory of bots which I absolutely agree with. The other is that more kids are getting online and on social media and are downright thick and do not have the capacity for discussions.
No-Breadfruit-4555@reddit
In a weird way, it reminds me of that Netflix show/novel “3 Body Problem”, where everything was watched and controlled by an all powerful AI programmed by aliens.
The 1984 connection is obvious too. It’s honestly terrifying the way it’s going. It’s one thing when it’s Amazon reviews for some $10 thingamabob from China… it’s a whole other when it is directly influencing the elections for the US President and Congress. Terrifying.
Fancy_Exchange_9821@reddit
most of reddit is actually bots
monos_muertos@reddit
Give it a week, then, based on the results of that inevitable event, decide what your prep strategy will be. Political craziness is part of what necessitates this sub, after all.
E-24-B29@reddit
I agree, and could be a mix of a few things.
Subreddit is larger than it previously was, bringing more people with less constructive thoughts in.
I'm sure there's a percentage of bots participating trying to push whatever narrative they've been paid to.
More miss information and general muddy waters making people confused, angry, and inflammatory.
Whimsical_Hobo@reddit
Remember at least in America, the literacy rate is at an all time low for the modern era. Some people are literally too dumb to understand or articulate themselves like human beings
Many-Ganache79@reddit
"Now, I see so many profoundly stupid comments "
I don't know really which one is worse - it's either the new generations come to this sub searching for anything that begins with "prepper" or it's actually a weaponized cohort of bots driven by a dig tech selling "opinion shaping" solutions like described here https://arxiv.org/abs/1910.08802
Either way, we are fucked, it's just the way we are fucked makes me raging - a prolonged palliative care for tax payers.
Spirited-Reputation6@reddit
All of social media is about 50-60% bots. 20-25% active participants and 15-25% inactive or viewers.
It’s all for social-engineering, “entertainment” and reconnoissance now.
eveebobevee@reddit
Same. I've been here since the COVID days and ever since this election season, the amount of political propaganda on both sides has increased dramatically.
This is a Reddit problem and I don't think they want to solve it.
I would be cool if mods could set up some sort of verification outside of Reddit to prove a user is not a bot