120 upvotes, 3 direct replies (showing 3)
View submission: Spring forward… into Reddit’s 2019 transparency report
How effective is reddit's bot-detection and management? There's large corporations and state actors both creating and buying old accounts and using them to manipulate the content on this site. Can you please publish more information about your countermeasures for this?
I would even be in favor of allowing moderators to see origin-subnet hotspots on threads, account age stats, account "life" patterns, etc. Do you make those available?
And, I know this is a big thing to ask, would it be possible for reddit to make data available to the general research community on this arms race? This kind of manipulation of content manipulation is a huge problem throughout the Internet, and it's getting worse. If one of the largest sites could make a comprehensive corpus available to researchers this would be a massive benefit for everyone.
Comment by AntmanIV at 25/02/2020 at 04:16 UTC
21 upvotes, 1 direct replies
Can you please publish more information about your countermeasures for this?
Sorry but, as a cybersecurity professional, I can tell you that this will never get an answer. If they release this info all it does is tell the bot writers what isn't effective so they can adapt. Sure, security through obscurity isn't great but as one layer of the onion it isn't hurting anything.
Comment by azriel777 at 25/02/2020 at 17:34 UTC
2 upvotes, 0 direct replies
All they have to do is look at any political or news subreddit and you will see tons of bots. Of course, that is second to the problem of shill mods, but we know reddit will do nothing about them.
Comment by Xadnem at 24/02/2020 at 22:32 UTC
7 upvotes, 3 direct replies
As a developer, I can make my bot behave exactly like a user if I wanted to. There would be no way to detect it as far as I do a decent enough job. You can imagine how a team of state backed actors would easily be able to do the same.