People say 'as long as it's not done to children, adults can do whatever they want' but seriously, it shouldn't be done to anyone. The doctors doing these surgeries should have their medical licenses revoked.

I guess I just don't get the obsession with them.

They've been banned across major social media. They're relentlessly attacked by the global media. Why pile on to these people still? They must be important to the movement I guess then, right?

Just went over to that sub and it's all pretty tame tbh. Not sure what the big deal is.

So why do you care what those people think? Are they that dangerous to you?

Or are you just running cover for all the Blue Anon people who are going around getting everyone deplatformed for being "White Supremacists" etc.?

I think those people are far more dangerous than anything Q Anoners are up to.

Blue Anon tards should stop trying to lecture Q Anoners about being morons. But we know you guys just have to keep repeating this every day like the good little shills you are.

How's TMOR these days now that you guys don't have Ax to jerk off to every day?

Where's all these Q people here exactly that I keep hearing about?

I don't get it.

What's this celebrity idolatry supposed to mean?

I'll copy my comment from another post:

As we've seen with users like GhostofDusty and Intellidinoalien, they've long ago infiltrated the mod team and I trust none of them.

It was clearly laid out shortly after Reddit's founding by Cass Sunstein and the likes:

Sunstein co-authored a 2008 paper with Adrian Vermeule, titled "Conspiracy Theories," dealing with the risks and possible government responses to conspiracy theories resulting from "cascades" of faulty information within groups that may ultimately lead to violence. In this article they wrote, "The existence of both domestic and foreign conspiracy theories, we suggest, is no trivial matter, posing real risks to the government's antiterrorism policies, whatever the latter may be." They go on to propose that, "the best response consists in cognitive infiltration of extremist groups",[38] where they suggest, among other tactics, "Government agents (and their allies) might enter chat rooms, online social networks, or even real-space groups and attempt to undermine percolating conspiracy theories by raising doubts about their factual premises, causal logic or implications for political action."[38] They refer, several times, to groups that promote the view that the US Government was responsible or complicit in the September 11 attacks as "extremist groups.

I mean really, who do we think these anonymous accounts are? Do we really think they didn't do everything they could to control these places long ago?

Over Three-quarters of U.S. Jews Voted for Biden in Election, Poll Finds: Democratic candidate secured 77 percent of the Jewish vote compared to Donald Trump’s 21 percent, according to survey, giving Joe Biden the widest points margin since 2008

Kimcheefarts is posting the most I've ever seen them post since Axo got banned.

JCP had said that they had banned the account and then someone unbanned it. Sounds like it's probably a mod alt considering all the user ever did was spam pictures of Trump with Epstein and got a pass.

As we've seen with users like GhostofDusty and Intellidinoalien, they've long ago infiltrated the mod team and I trust none of them.

It was clearly laid out shortly after Reddit's founding by Cass Sunstein and the likes:

Sunstein co-authored a 2008 paper with Adrian Vermeule, titled "Conspiracy Theories," dealing with the risks and possible government responses to conspiracy theories resulting from "cascades" of faulty information within groups that may ultimately lead to violence. In this article they wrote, "The existence of both domestic and foreign conspiracy theories, we suggest, is no trivial matter, posing real risks to the government's antiterrorism policies, whatever the latter may be." They go on to propose that, "the best response consists in cognitive infiltration of extremist groups",[38] where they suggest, among other tactics, "Government agents (and their allies) might enter chat rooms, online social networks, or even real-space groups and attempt to undermine percolating conspiracy theories by raising doubts about their factual premises, causal logic or implications for political action."[38] They refer, several times, to groups that promote the view that the US Government was responsible or complicit in the September 11 attacks as "extremist groups.

PLC said they suspected one of the mods over there was an admin. Would love for them to lay out all of their suspicions.

Is this conspiracies.win or bitch about reddit like a bunch of sissy fags?

That's the point of this thread. I'm tired of hearing about them already and it's been less than a week since the Axo ban.

I used the site for years and I know others here put in far more effort on the site than I ever did, so I think some people still need to vent a little.

Then maybe we can move our energies to other topics, like building up the community we have here.

I'll start.

Mods of r/conspiracy were incredibly corrupt. i experienced targeted removals for years on the sub. Mods left up countless threads attacking the userbase while removing benign threads just to remind you who was in control. IMO they purposely let their userbase be relentlessly trolled every day. They purposely kept a small cabal of mods so that no one would actually get in the way and actively moderate all of the abusive content.

Maybe this was all for marketing purposes and some of them are admin alts, because we all know conflict drives the algos. But I tend to think it was more about a cabal of lefties that had lost ideological control over the sub and did all they could to allow those users to be relentlessy attacked. Just my two cents.

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.

continued...

• Wall Street Journal: Turkey's Government Forms 6,000-Member Social Media Team

• The Bush and Gore campaigns of 2000 used methods similar to the Chinese government for conducting “guided discussions” in chatrooms designed to influence citizens

• Salon: Why Reddit moderators are censoring Glenn Greenwald’s latest news story on shills

Shilling in the Private Sector

• NPR: Some Amazon Reviews Are Too Good To Be Believed. They're Paid For. "Much like Amazon itself is a marketplace for goods, a world of separate, shadow marketplaces exists where reviews for Amazon products are bought and paid for — private Facebook groups, Slack channels, subreddits and more."

• Fake five-star reviews being bought and sold online - Fake online reviews are being openly traded on the internet, a BBC investigation has found.

• Yahoo News: Last month the FTC issued warnings to celebrities who plugged products on their Instagram accounts without clearly identifying their relationships with brands. The letters were meant to educate the celebrities on posting without violating the organization’s disclosure guidelines.

• New York Times: Tobacco corporations are targeting young American consumers with deceptive social media marketing in violation of federal law. 123 hashtags associated with these companies’ tobacco products have been viewed 8.8 billion times in the United States alone and 25 billion times around the world.

• PBS Frontline Documentary - Generation Like

• USA Today: Lord & Taylor settles FTC charges over paid Instagram posts

• Wired: Microsoft, through an outside agency, paid Machinima to produce positive videos about the Xbox One game machine, and many of the YouTube stars who accepted the deal failed to properly disclose that they were producing paid, sponsored content, not independent analysis.

• CNBC: The Federal Reserve Bank is soliciting proposals from developers for a "Social Listening Platform" that will monitor "Facebook, Twitter, Blogs, Forums and YouTube...to "Handle crisis situations, "continuously monitor conversations, identify and reach out to key bloggers and influencers." [2011]

• CNN: A PR firm has revealed that it is behind two blogs that previously appeared to be created by independent supporters of Wal-Mart. The blogs Working Families for Wal-mart and subsidiary site Paid Critics are written by 3 employees of PR firm Edelman, for whom Wal-Mart is a paid client. [2006]

• The Verge: Anti-net neutrality spammers are impersonating real people to flood FCC comments

• Vice: Trolls Paid by a Telecom Lobbying Firm Keep Commenting on My Net Neutrality Articles

• The Guardian: In a New York investigation dubbed "Operation Clean Turf," dentists, lawyers, an ultra-sound clinic, Staten Island bus company US Coachways, a charter bus operator, a teeth-whitening service, a laser hair-removal chain and an adult entertainment club were caught buying fake reviews. The fake review companies posted on sites like Citysearch, Google, Yahoo and Yelp.

• New York Times: When a Company's Product Is Under Fire, One Option is to Plant a Defender in the Chat Room

• Time: Social Media Manipulation? When “Indie” Bloggers and Businesses Get Cozy

• New York Times: Give Yourself 5 Stars? Online, It Might Cost You

• Chicago Tribune: Nutrition for sale: How Kellogg worked with 'independent experts' to tout cereal

• The Atlantic: Kim Kardashian was paid to post a selfie on Instagram and Twitter advertising a pharmaceutical product. Sent to 42 million followers on Instagram and 32 million on Twitter, this illegal advertisement did not contain any risk information or language specifying that it was a paid endorsement.

• Warner Brothers fined for paying YouTube celebs to promote game without properly disclosing that the videos were paid endorsements.

• Gamers promote gaming-gambling site on youtube by pretending to hit jackpot without disclosing that they own the site. They tried to retroactively write a disclosure covering their tracks, but were caught.

• CSGO Lotto Owners Settle FTC’s First-Ever Complaint Against Individual Social Media Influencers

• "Internet Reputation Management," founded by three partners in the New York area, recruits bloggers to write about clients on third-party sites, without necessarily disclosing that they're paid

• Slate: Want to Get Paid For TV Criticism? Shill for DISH.

• Sony viral marketing campaign exposed (2006). The company admits they ran the shady advertising campaign.

• ADWEEK: Marketing on Reddit Is Scary, But These Success Stories Show Big Potential

• BBC news: Amazon targets 1,114 'fake reviewers' in Seattle lawsuit

• New York Times: Lifestyle Lift, a cosmetic surgery company, reached a settlement with the State of New York over its attempts to fake positive consumer reviews on the Web. The company had ordered employees to pretend they were satisfied customers and write glowing reviews of its face-lift procedure on Web sites

• Samsung Electronics Fined for Fake Online Comments [in Taiwan]

Shill Bots

• Artificial intelligence chatbots will overwhelm human speech online; the rise of MADCOMs

• Russian bots were active on Reddit last year, from /r/RussiaLago

• BBC- How online chatbots are already tricking you- Intelligent machines that can pass for humans have long been dreamed of, but as Chris Baraniuk argues, they’re already among us. The ramifications of astroturfing are in fact so serious that the US Department of Defense funded research to detect chatbots.

• Wired: Powered by rapid advances in artificial intelligence, propaganda bots will soon run on genetic algorithms that let their ideas and messaging evolve, based on the resonance and effectiveness of previous messages. We are likely to see versions of these bots deployed on US audiences as part of the 2016 presidential election campaigns.

• BBC: More than four times as many tweets were made by automated accounts in favour of Donald Trump around the first US presidential debate as by those backing Hillary Clinton, a study says.

• Discover Magazine: Researchers Uncover Twitter Bot Army That’s 350,000 Strong

• The Rise of Social Bots

• Forbes: From Tinder Bots To 'Cuban Twitter', Welcome To 'Cognitive Hacking'

• Wired: Pro-Government Twitter Bots Try to Hush Mexican Activists

They stalked me to another site and then gave me an admin ban on Reddit for evading a sub ban.