Information about shilling on Reddit

• /u/slaterhearst spammed Reddit with links to The Atlantic. "The Daily Dot has confirmed that slaterhearst was Jared Keller, the associate editor and social media editor at magazine giant The Atlantic."

• Forbes: Reddit Is Being Manipulated By Big Financial Services Companies

• User pushes InfoWars links on Reddit, eventually admits to working for Infowars.

• Shareblue accounts caught in /r/politics posting links to Shareblue without disclosing their affiliation, which caused the mods to create a new disclosure rule and an official Shareblue account was registered. About a month later, Shareblue was again caught shilling on /r/politics without disclosing ties to the outlet, which caused them to ban Shareblue links to the sub.

• Hillary Clinton Super Pac and "strategic research and rapid response team designed to defend Hillary Clinton from baseless attacks" openly admits to shilling on Reddit.

• User posts video using GoPro, gets video to front page, admits in comments that GoPro sent him free cameras in exchange for advertising. (archive: http://archive.is/ICGrl)

• Top mod of /r/Mechanical_Gifs tries to sell subreddit on ebay for 999.00 dollars.

• How Reddit Got Huge: Tons of Fake Accounts - According to Reddit cofounder Steve Huffman, in the early days the Reddit crew just faked it ‘til they made it.

• Shill posts picture of a dog in a hammock with the brand clearly visible without indicating that it's an ad in the title of the post, making it an illegal advertisement. Later, he posts a promo code in the comments for 20 percent off his hammocks.

• Redditor who works for a potato mailing company admits to being a shill. He shows off his 27 thousand dollars he made in /r/pics (Screenshot because he deleted his posts.) [Here's the thread.]

• /r/netsec talks about gaming reddit via sockpuppets and how online discourse is (easily) manipulated.

• Reddit is being gamed by professional shills every day. We investigate how widespread the problem of fake comments and fake votes is in our Reddit For Sale follow-up. [11:48]

• Reddit For Sale: How We Bought The Top Spot For $200 [8:27]

• Some websites use shill accounts to spam their competitor's articles, causing their competitors to become banned on Reddit.

• Wikileaks: Reddit cofounder consulting for Stratfor to bring in the social media dollars

• Shilling on Reddit is openly admitted to in this Forbes article

• What I learned selling my Reddit accounts

• Reddit automation bot: "Run Up To 100 Threads, Checks For Valid Proxy Access & Also To Check If Banned From Site, Keyword Based Submission Finder & Vote Up/Down Capabilities, Mass upvote or downvote Mode..."

• Boostupvotes.com

• Reddit Secrets, buy upvotes

• Reddit Secrets, buy pre-aged and high karma accounts

Science

• New Scientist: Sock puppet accounts unmasked by the way they write and post

• Researcher's algorithm weeds out people using multiple online accounts to spread propaganda - Based on word choice, punctuation and context, the method is able to detect whether one person or multiple people are responsible for the samples.

• Fake product reviews may be pervasive, study finds

• When grassroots activism becomes a commodity - UCLA sociologist investigates 'astroturf' campaigns

• Content-Driven Detection of Campaigns in Social Media [PDF]

Additional information

• Shill Confessions and Additional Information (most confessions are unverifiable due to NDA's and possible trolling.)

• Clinton Campaign used "grass-roots tweeters" to post tweets and graphics at strategic times during the 2016 election campaign.

• Meme Warfare Center (PDF. Proposal written in 2006)

• WAR.COM: THE INTERNET AND PSYCHOLOGICAL OPERATIONS (Proposal written in 2001 by Angela Maria Lungu - Major, US Army.)

• The Gentleperson's Guide To Forum Spies

• Corporate and governmental manipulation of Wikipedia articles

• TEDx Astroturf and manipulation of media messages (Sharyl Attkisson)

• "Changing the hive mind -- How social media manipulation affects everything" by Tim Weninger at TEDxUND

What you should do about this

I made this thread in the hopes that it could be used as a citation. There isn't much we can do to stop the manipulation, but we can spread this information so that people can at least become aware of it.

The previous generation became somewhat aware of the manipulation in the media. Imagine how effective it would be if few people knew about it? That is what is happening today. We are being advertised to and subjected to propaganda without being aware of it, which is very dangerous. The only reason why this type of propaganda works so well is because most people trust comments and posts with a lot of upvotes and likes. People trust that the information they are looking for will be at the top of threads or on the front page of a subreddit, oblivious to the fact that certain types of information may become buried in artificial downvotes or buried using a "forum slide." Not only that, but this is becoming automated. We must educate others about this problem before we are drowned out by bots.

Some of this stuff is automatically removed by Reddit, so you have to link to a thread that was manually approved in order to cite the information.

Share this thread where you can or cite small bits of this post in your travels.