flyawayhigh

Here's a section on Reddit, but read the whole thing. The rest is fascinating too.

“You can use proxy accounts to ‘upvote’ articles you want to promote; or to ‘downvote’ articles you want to kill,” he said.

“Reddit expects people to try and game the system, so has many defences in place,” he added.

Still, Thinkst managed to breach those defences easily. It registered 50 proxy accounts and found that this was sufficient to upvote or downvote articles in subreddits – the various, more specialised sections on the platform.

Articles that are downvoted enough times are removed from the page for Reddit admins to investigate – but that act in itself is a victory, because, as noted, the article is knocked off the page.

“You can also try ‘trickle downvoting’ – only downvote as many times as new articles have upvotes. It keeps the score even, and while you do this, upvote the article you want people to see,” Azhar said.

When Thinkst did some mass downvoting on the WorldNews subreddit, downvoting all new articles as they appeared, the admins suspected something was up, but all they did was to put up a notice telling their users not to panic.

When Thinkst tried the same type of manipulation on the more specialised NetSec subreddit – devoted to news and matters about cyber-security – “the moderators responded with intelligent discussions and roped in official reddit admins to talk about the problem."

“But even then, they didn’t seem to have a handle of what was really going on. We had 50 bots operating, but they estimated only 20,” said Azhar.

“This shouldn’t have been so hard to spot at all,” added Haroon. “You have a bunch of users all voting on the same article, and you can isolate and detect things like voting in synch; signup times that are similar; common email domains; patterns in usernames; IP (Internet Protocol) addresses from known open proxies; and more, including users with low karma scores.”

‘Karma’ is how Reddit users are rated for their contributions to and engagement with the community. - See more at: http://www.digitalnewsasia.com/digital-economy/censorship-shadowy-forces-controlling-online-conversations?page=0%2C1#sthash.nXXrDRf3.dpuf

There was nothing on Wikipedia. They should check that out too.

permatruth

This stuff is so easy to spot, in fact, that Reddit had to first blur upvote and downvote counters and then hide some voting metrics altogether to keep users from noticing it. They don't do anything about it until they are certain that the people doing it don't have their blessing. Whether that blessing is gained via threats, money changing hands, or some mix is unknown.

But there is something worth pointing out. In 2010, Reddit was extraordinarily active in supporting Occupy protests. The very same protests media lied about outright and still does. The same ones that required blatant police brutality to break up.

The actual goals and complaints of the protests were discussed at great length. People donated to send supplies to the protesters. There was even a bona fide PAC established by those seeking to affect change legitimately, using the system we have.

Shortly after the protests' breakup, the site went from a swarm of thought about civic duties and political participation to a place where the issues of Occupy, and especially Occupy itself, couldn't be discussed at all . As in, every single comment along those lines was met with insults and even threats, removed by moderators, responded to with stalking, and I even suspect that if users change IP address and make a new account on Reddit, somehow the admins still identify them. Participation is generally denied to those who wouldn't drop the Occupy issues quickly enough; especially those with a history of political speech on the site.

In the time since, one of Reddit's founders quit and established a shadowy marketing firm known to manipulate Reddit, and the other was bullied into suicide by a prosecutor. He was threatened with life imprisonment for downloading too many papers from a database he was authorized to use, and he didn't even distribute anything.

It's not a conspiracy theory when it's not a theory. For something to be a theory, first there has to be a question. There's no question what's going on here. Then an educated guess has to be made. There is no need to guess about what occurs blatantly in the open for all to see. Then the guess has to be tested and its predictions shown to hold. That happens when a prediction is made using good information, and it has happened all along with this matter. Good predictions aren't exclusive to theories. Obvious, blatant, unquestionable fact also leads to good predictions. It can't be a conspiracy theory because it's not a theory.

It also can't be a conspiracy theory because a conspiracy is an agreement to commit a crime. No crime has been committed here. Well, at least no crime has been committed beyond the same extent to which Schwartz committed a crime. Both cases involve violation of user agreements, but that shouldn't be considered a crime in either case. It can't be a conspiracy theory because there's no conspiracy.

Freedom of speech today means freedom to be stalked, harassed, and threatened. And I do not believe for a split second that the admins at Reddit are not facilitating sockpuppeting, among other things.

The one and only way we will ever again have a platform for free discussion is if one comes about that requires a monthly subscription fee and isn't anonymous. Nobody can read or write to it without a paid membership. Even then, very active moderation to banish disruptive accounts will be required. And even then, the entire project would probably be compromised before it could even be finished. The reason this would work, despite the sacrifice of anonymity, is that even if groups out there decide to sockpuppet, to do so they'll have to fund those working to stop them.

Users don't need to be able to see real life identities, but admins should, and moderators should see numeric indication when two accounts correspond to the same payment details under that system.

Downvotes available to be distributed should be randomly distributed like on Slashdot. Moderators should be paid and held to a strict code of conduct. Moderation records and moderator messages should be public. Users should be able to fire moderators. Membership should cost a subscription fee. No user information should ever be sold. No marketing should ever happen unless it's a fluke of user interests, occurring organically. Only that site can possibly have free speech. It doesn't exist. Until it does, you will be the product, whether it's the details of your private life being sold or access to your brain for purposes of manipulation.

Nothing is free. There's always a price. I'd rather the price not be free expression and sane discourse.

matt

Very well said.

721r

Don't miss presentation slides (pdf, 55mb) , some interesting details there.

PDFy mirror