This astroturfing issue on Reddit is still relevant in 2025!

  • The Velour Fog @lemmy.world
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    4 days ago

    A couple years ago there was this shitty wallpaper company called Plasteur or some shit, that ran a guerilla campaign of overlaying a corner of thousands of gifs with their URL and releasing a bunch of bots that only replied to comments using gifs with the injected URL. Those bots were very hard to flag for removal because they operated mostly in the shitposting okbuddy subs, so if you called them out, you were downvoted to hell for “killing the vibe.” Also the bots would block accounts that called them out so you could no longer reply to or report them.

    There are also entire subs that are completely overrun with astroturfing bots, like r/malwares and r/free_vpn.

    This is a problem that has been going on for years and it is magnitudes worse now than ever.

    • Tollana1234567@lemmy.today
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      3 days ago

      the subs that are overrun with bots, they are usually they just to get enough karma or whatever so reddit doesnt ban them with thier anti-spamming botting measures. its a way to “warm up” thier hundreds of accounts at least temporarily.