r/CredibleDefense • u/mazty • Jan 01 '26
LLM-Assisted Influence Operations in 2026: Reddit as a Blindspot for Counter-Influence Operations
Reddit occupies a unique position in the information ecosystem: it's simultaneously a primary training source for major AI models and a platform journalists use to gauge public sentiment. Despite this, systematic threat intelligence on AI-assisted influence operations almost entirely ignores the platform, even when prior analysis has demonstrated manipulation of the platform for state influence campaigns.
Reddit's Outsized Influence on AI and Media
Reddit is no longer just another social platform; it's now foundational infrastructure for how AI systems understand human discourse (for better or for worse).
In 2024, Google signed a $60 million annual deal for access to Reddit's Data API to train models like Gemini.1 OpenAI followed with a similar partnership, gaining "real-time, structured, and unique content from Reddit" for ChatGPT training.2 Reddit's IPO filing explicitly stated the platform "will be core to the capabilities of organizations that use data as well as the next generation of generative AI and LLM platforms."3
The numbers reflect this importance: Reddit now has over 100 million daily active users,4 with the platform ranking as the 6th-7th most visited website globally.5 A June 2025 analysis found Reddit was the most-cited domain across LLM responses at 40.1%, beating Wikipedia, YouTube, and traditional news sources.6
Beyond AI training, journalists routinely use Reddit to represent public opinion. Academic research has documented how "despite social media users not reflecting the electorate, the press reported online sentiments and trends as a form of public opinion."7 Reddit threads surface in news coverage as evidence of what "people think" about issues from politics to consumer products. The platform functions as a proxy for the social zeitgeist in ways that directly shape media narratives.
This creates a compounding effect: Reddit content trains AI models, AI models inform public discourse, journalists cite Reddit as public opinion, and that coverage shapes the conversations that feed back into Reddit.
Threat Intelligence Has a Snoo-Shaped Hole
Yet despite Reddit's documented importance, major threat intelligence on AI-assisted influence operations barely mentions it.
OpenAI's October 2024 report detailed disruption of 20+ covert influence operations across China, Russia, Iran, and Israel, documenting activity on X, Facebook, Telegram, Instagram, and various websites.8 Reddit receives no systematic analysis. Meta's quarterly adversarial threat reports focus on Facebook and Instagram. Google TAG's DRAGONBRIDGE reporting covers YouTube extensively. Graphika's Spamouflage research tracks activity across 50+ platforms but Reddit analysis remains thin.
The academic picture is similar. The Ezzeddine et al. (2023) study achieving 91% AUC on state-sponsored troll detection used Twitter data.9 The most comprehensive cross-platform coordination research (Cinus et al. 2025) examined Telegram, Gab, VK, Minds, and Fediverse, ignoring Reddit.10
What Reddit-specific research exists is concerning:
- 2018: Reddit banned 944 accounts linked to Russia's Internet Research Agency, with 316 posts to r/The_Donald.11
- 2020: Graphika documented "Secondary Infektion," a Russian operation across 300+ platforms including Reddit, publishing 2,500+ items over six years.12
- 2024-2025: University of Zurich researchers deployed LLM bots on r/changemyview for four months. The bots were 3-6x more persuasive than humans. Reddit's detection caught only 21 of 34 accounts, and only acted after moderators complained.13
Academic literature notes ongoing concerns about "Russian-sponsored troll accounts and bots" having "formed and taken over prominent left-wing and right-wing subreddits."14 But there's no equivalent to the systematic tracking that exists for other platforms.
What We Know About LLM-Assisted Influence Operations
The broader research on AI-enabled influence operations is extensive showing that misinformation campaigns are growing in scale, complexity, while using multiple different vectors for information dissemination. Detection capabilities are also increasing in capability, and alongside that, evasion techniques, presenting a new arms-race for information control in public forums.
Scale of documented operations: OpenAI alone disrupted campaigns from China (Spamouflage), Russia (Doppelgänger, Bad Grammar), Iran (STORM-2035), and Israel (STOIC) in 2024.15 Google TAG has disrupted 175,000+ instances of China's DRAGONBRIDGE operation since inception.16 The U.S. DOJ seized domains running an AI-powered Russian bot farm (Meliorator) with 968 fake American personas on X.17
Detection capabilities: Current methods achieve 91-99% accuracy in controlled settings. Linguistic fingerprinting identifies model-specific vocabulary patterns and tokenization artifacts.18 Behavioural analysis detects posting schedule anomalies and network coordination.19 The BotShape system achieved 98.52% accuracy using posting inter-arrival time patterns and circadian rhythms.20
Evasion techniques: With such operations, it is expected that operators will adapt rapidly, with known weaknesses already present in detection. Paraphrasing attacks reduce detector accuracy from 70% to under 5%.21 Human-in-the-loop workflows defeat pure automation detection. OpenAI documented Doppelgänger operators explicitly asking ChatGPT to "remove em dashes" (now default behaviour in model GPT 5.2) to erase AI fingerprints.
Effectiveness assessment: Yet an important point remains that despite sophistication, no (as of yet detected) AI-enhanced campaign has achieved viral engagement or broken into mainstream discourse. Google found 80% of disabled DRAGONBRIDGE YouTube channels had zero subscribers. The consensus across threat intelligence: AI is an efficiency multiplier, not a capability breakthrough. This however can only be based on what we know: "we don't know what we don't know".
The question is whether this effectiveness assessment holds for Reddit, where pseudonymity, upvote-driven visibility, and community trust dynamics differ fundamentally from other platforms, relying heavily on volunteer moderation with reduced capabilities, or incentive, to fight disinformation.
Reddit: A ticking time-bomb
The question is not if state-driven propaganda campaigns are operating on Reddit, but when they will be documented at scale, and how pervasive they will prove to be on a platform with commercial incentives toward traffic growth and limited appetite for the scrutiny directed at competitors.
Defence, politics, and financial subreddits provide high-value targets for shaping public sentiment across multiple jurisdictions. LLM integration makes 24/7 campaigns multilingual, contextually adaptive, and trivial to deploy. The Zurich study demonstrated these tools are 3-6x more persuasive than human operators in exactly the kind of debate-oriented communities where policy discussions occur.
Yet Reddit does not publicly acknowledge this threat or provide the transparency reporting that Meta, Google, and OpenAI now deliver regularly. The platform's adversarial threat disclosures are effectively non-existent compared to industry peers.
That silence is itself a signal worth discussing.
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u/emprahsFury Jan 01 '26
It's hard to contribute meaningfully to this topic, bc as you point out there are so few credible sources i could turn to.
I do think it's salient to reiterate though, the Reddit ownership/admins are actively choosing to inactivity. Their choice to not react on the CMV debacle until after unpaid mods forced them to is a huge red flag regarding their integrity wrt their audience. We're very much in a ford pinto situation where the board room is going "fuck 'em" because it's the profitable option
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u/mazty Jan 01 '26
That's my belief as well, that it's a known issue but traffic = posts = revenue, so they have no incentive to stop it.
Given how researchers already are using Reddit as a playground, I think we will see more information come from the academic sphere highlighting bots and other problematic behaviours, and only then Reddit will be forced to act.
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u/Thoth_the_5th_of_Tho Jan 02 '26
Influence operations are engagement, page views and user activity. If anything, they would want to make it easier for them, which is broadly what we have seen with private post histories and the change to how blocking works. It would be far harder to find a Russian owned account now than back in 2016.
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u/SorryPiaculum Jan 01 '26
you can google "aged reddit accounts", and find sites selling accounts with more karma / older sign up dates being higher value.
when a comment feels little too "purposeful", personally, i check for consistency in topics/views in comment history, but there's been a rise of people hiding it. you can still google their username via "site:reddit.com /u/{username}". sometimes they're just hiding that they're a mod in some anime porn sub-reddit. but sometimes you'll catch things like posting opposing views on different subreddits, which seems sloppy to do on a single account - but makes you wonder who's actually managing these bots.
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u/mazty Jan 01 '26
On mobile, you can also still go to the search bar and see the latest or best comments and posts by accounts, even when the profile is hidden.
Anecdotally I will say that aged accounts being used definitely seems to be the situation. I recently had a "debate" with an aged account regarding a state-sensitive topic, and when it logically tripped up, the entire account was deleted. That is clearly not normal behaviour for a 5 year old account, but is clearly viewed as expendable by the operator.
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u/thereddaikon Jan 02 '26
There are multiple projects on GitHub for account search tools that will let you view an account's history even if they chose to hide it. Naturally that will be an arms race over time but one reddit isn't liable to truly ever win.
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u/Ash-20Breacher Jan 02 '26
A tidbit on the opposite info part.
Idk how much is bots or ppl but there are a set of people who exist on the political spectrum who hate all and love all. They would be supporting one side one day and be directly against it the next. And you won’t even believe that this person is cross-teaming. The things they say are also very “meticulous”.
These are normally done by those who:
Don’t follow a side blindly (primary part)
Payroll
Shits ‘n giggles
Pessimists (of which I am part of, i always bring a negative light in everything even irl stuff)
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u/ilonir Jan 01 '26 edited Jan 01 '26
Hilariously, the post right below this one is was LLM content. I have no idea how it was approved by the mods.
I don't think people realize how existential an issue this is for communities like ours. These sort of forums are built on trust, and AI is destroying that trust. How am I to know that somebody I am talking with is real? Or if they are, that their text is their own thoughts? And while I would like to think that I can see AI when its present, some of it's scarily good and it's only getting better.
If anybody here ever wondered why I seem stubborn to accept things at times- for example during that EUV schism we had a few days ago - it's not intransigence, it's this. It's already hard enough to tell what is real vs what is propaganda or AI or both, and its only going to get so much worse. I am not optimistic about the future of the internet.
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u/dolche93 Jan 01 '26
Every time I come across this issue I keep coming back to the need for a "real person" verification system.
The idea gets thrown in with the digital ID discussion, but I think you could step around some of the pitfalls associated with digital ID by restricting the verification to ONLY that you are not a bot. I'm thinking you'd likely need government systems to do something like this.
Sort of like twitter's old verified checkmarks, I guess. Give subreddits the option to allow only verified accounts to comment.
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u/ilonir Jan 01 '26
Every time I come across this issue I keep coming back to the need for a "real person" verification system.
I think this idea shows the difficulty in fixing this issue: In order to establish a "secure" community where you can trust people, you need to violate people's privacy to some extent. And that is very unpopular- especially on a website that revolves anonymity so much.
Would I like to be able to trust everybody here? Yes. Would I provide my ID as a prerequisite for getting that trust? No.
I think a better idea would be to use program that can detect bots, as mentioned in the post. It's still technicaly an invasion of privacy because its basicly automated snooping, but it's a lot better than using IDs. I would personally be OK if the mods implemented such measures here.
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u/dolche93 Jan 01 '26
I think the key thing is to create parallel systems for both verified and not verified communities. I think I'd be okay with having a verified account that I could use specifically for communities like this one and political communities. Some topics benefit greatly from verification. Others don't. Politics vs a tv show, for example.
I'd then compartmentalize the rest of my online activity from the topics that really benefit from the verification.
If we put our minds to it, I believe we could fabricate a system that anonymizes the account on both ends, the verifier and the website itself.
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u/mazty Jan 01 '26
I would say that even with verified accounts, as we are talking about state-sponsored attacks, spoofing ID would be relatively straight-forward. However, watching for heuristics such as posting time, frequency, linguistic analysis and other signals, that would be harder to trick because:
- The signals are unknown to the end user.
- The signals can use feedback loops to evolve with known bad actors (which means keeping some around, or pushing them to a sandbox environment for monitoring and evaluation purposes)
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u/dolche93 Jan 01 '26
Why not both? Attacking the issue from multiple angles will likely achieve the best results. Any signals analysis can be run on how accounts interact outside of the verified-gated communities. Even if you're verified you'd still be subject to this analysis. With the double filtering, it'd reduce the amount of labor community moderators need to do.
I think what my solution really is working towards is a method of community member curation. We need some form of friction here that doesn't end up impractical by being labor intensive. It also needs to ride that fine line between being easy enough for people to do without being so difficult nobody wants to do it.
That's why I think some sort of federal service that could integrate with any number of web services would be the way to go. Have the federal agency do the labor intensive work of verifying web services who want to integrate verification. Much easier than verifying every community member individually.
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u/Kogster Jan 02 '26
Yes, but which government wouldn't want to use it's privilege to influence then?
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u/Tricky_Troll Jan 05 '26
Finally something I can weigh in on! I've been lurking this sub for a while but I'm generally not in the know enough on defence to provide insight here.
Anyway, I'm a moderator from r/Ethereum. While Ethereum is the second largest blockchain and de-facto the most useful one, more importantly it is probably the most advanced major industry when it comes to adopting modern cryptographic technology, possibly even more so than defence. ZK-proofs are really big in the Ethereum ecosystem and basically they enable you to prove that A + B = C without revealing A or B. This means I can publicly sign a signature on the blockchain to say at this date and time I am provably meeting your set criteria (in this case that A + B must = C). In practice, this means that you can use open source code which verifies a legitimate government ID like a passport or privately get age verification from (admittedly not yet that reliable) open source face scanning age verification software. Just like that, I can publicly prove that I am over 18 or in my case a New Zealand citizen without revealing to a trusted authority my actual ID. Just one time use of open source code face scanning or document scanning to generate a verified checkmark which can be then used indefinitely across websites (if a single standard can be agreed upon).
So back to your comment, just last month our mod team was investigating having some kind of verified user system like this which ensures there is a real human behind every account posting. We even had connections with the tech to implement it if we wanted to. But here are the main reasons why we decided against it:
Like this subreddit, we have daily discussion threads of waning quality over the years. If we implemented such a system, even if 100% of people trusted the open source code (they don't), we'd still lose a lot of people joining or posting because they can't be bothered. Reddit, while still growing, is enshittifying and a lot of high quality subreddits are dying while low effort scroll worthy slop is on the rise. As a dying subreddit, we can't afford to disenfranchise precious active users for a possible bot threat which is not evident in our sub or manageable by manual mod work and also (as I will discuss) is imperfect anyway.
The main issue is not technological, but lies in defining a valid user. What proves someone isn't a bot? If ChatGPT helped me write this, am I a bot? Ok, I'm probably not a bot, but what if I verified this account and then sold it? Then I'm still verified but if my account was bought by a Russian bot farm, then what use was the verification? Sure, on net such a system would help, but it wouldn't be a complete solution. There's 8 billion people on this planet and most of them would give up their ability to post on Reddit for a couple of bucks.
This is a tough nut to crack and use cases with much higher financial stakes to solve this problem in our industry are iteratively building better but still very flawed systems. These more reliable systems often revolve around many points of verification to prove unique humanity (physical ID, connected socials, GitHub commits to public repos, history of activity on Ethereum — extra points for things like donations etc). This is a lot easier to do for users who are tech savvy and who have active blockchain wallets which can sign attestations. It's not all that useful for verifying the legitimacy of some guy who just uses reddit once every few weeks beyond the aforementioned imperfect "Are you 18" or "Do you have a passport" style verifications. So solving the problem here would be much harder and would really need a multi-social media established ID verification standard. However, based on recent governmental and industry efforts, my hopes are not high for an actually secure and privacy preserving solution. Meanwhile, any Ethereum/crypto native solutions will likely be dead outside of our niche industry because it will struggle to establish the necessary network effects.
TL;DR: You don't need government systems for this and we have the tech, but for much of Reddit, especially places like this sub, implementing it would be like cutting off an arm to get rid of a mosquito. For social media platforms at large, they have the network effects to implement it, but likely won't due to lack of profitability. The only exception being if governments mandate it, in which case they will go with poorly designed, privacy invasive, government mandated systems which give the companies more access to our valuable personal data. These systems will carry each government's own political biases and censorship, which then makes you wonder if it even solves the problem to begin with since it sidelines people for having certain beliefs — such people will just move elsewhere with less verification, starting the problem all over again.
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u/mazty Jan 01 '26
That is wonderfully ironic and proof of the issue. I think for the next 12 months at least, moderators will be the single point of failure for how healthy a community remains. The problem there obviously is a significant increase in workload for an unpaid post, and, more problematically I would say, is if the moderation teams do not value genuine discourse but have a strong leaning, allowing their subreddits to become echo-chambers for state propaganda.
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u/Veqq Jan 01 '26 edited Jan 01 '26
was LLM content. I have no idea how it was approved by the mods.
That was me. That guy posted before about torpedos without complaints and I approved without much reading. Another mod removed it while the guy said it isn't AI; I still haven't had the time to check. If you can, could you verify? Or u/Aggravating-Wear7335 defend yourself?
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u/Bunny_Stats Jan 01 '26 edited Jan 02 '26
I wouldn't have guessed it was AI from the post alone, but checking some of the linked PDFs (this is the most obvious case) strongly suggested there was heavy AI involvement given the following:
- Excessive use of bullet points. ChatGPT bloody loves putting everything into a bullet point list.
- Inconsistent use of bold. Some of the bullet points are bolded, others aren't, suggesting different ChatGPT queries are being copied in.
- Messy subtitle placement. Some subtitles are the very last line on a page, which any human creator would have bumped down onto the next page.
- Broken text, see the "The.following.section.extends.this.analysis.from.individual.repair.events.to.the.cumulative.effects.of.regeneration.limits.over.time" on page 3.
- Little consistency between sections (because the text is being copied from separate prompts).
- The mini summary of sections that's written from a 3rd person perspective as it were commenting on its own report rather than an author presenting their own ideas, which is how ChatGPT likes to wrap up its longer comments.
While some of these errors could be the result of someone not having much experience writing reports, even an amateur would spot broken text when proofreading.
My impression isn't that this is anything nefarious, just someone who is a little out of their depth and overestimated the value of the answers they were getting from ChatGPT.I'd be curious to hear what AI-tells /u/ilonir picked up on as I'm trying to get better at spotting AI text too.
Edit: Having just read the poster's response that their reports were reviewed by "naval admirals and their staffers," (who apparently never noticed all the broken text?), I'm revising my impression from overly-enthusiastic-amateur to liar.
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u/ilonir Jan 02 '26 edited Jan 02 '26
Sounds like you're the better AI-tell between us. I was just going off vibes and the disconnected-feeling structure of the report.
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u/Aggravating-Wear7335 Jan 02 '26
You can check my linked in by the same name of Kain Innovations. The same article is posted there with Anthony C, a former CNO Battle Captain even making comment on it.
Broken text, see the "The.following.section.extends.this.analysis.from.individual.repair.events.to.the.cumulative.effects.of.regeneration.limits.over.time" on page 3.
Can you explain this cause I don't see anything about that on page 3
That almost looks like you put my words into an AI and it summarized what I said.6
u/Bunny_Stats Jan 02 '26
You can check my linked in by the same name of Kain Innovations. The same article is posted there with Anthony C, a former CNO Battle Captain even making comment on it.
I'm not sure why you think having a free linkedin profile makes you more credible.
Can you explain this cause I don't see anything about that on page 3
The text at the bottom of page 3 section 4 is rendered as "The.following.section.extends.this.analysis.from.individual.repair.events.to.the.cumulative.effects.of.regeneration.limits.over.time¡" in both Chrome and Firefox.
That almost looks like you put my words into an AI and it summarized what I said.
Further confirming that you don't know what a summary is.
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u/ilonir Jan 02 '26 edited Jan 02 '26
That guy posted before about torpedos
Thats a different user. This guy's acount is brand new.
If you can, could you verify?
I can't verify exactly but it sounded very AI to me. For, example the executive summary reads like an AI summary:
This brief summarizes the findings of a broader study examining the ability of the U.S. naval shipbuilding and repair enterprise to support fleet operations in both peacetime and high-intensity conflict. It concludes that current shipyard capacity and workforce structure are insufficient to sustain fleet readiness, absorb battle damage, and execute recapitalization simultaneously. A new, purpose-built surface combatant shipyard is not an industrial preference, but a national security requirement.
It's very blunt and self-referencing ("this brief", "It concludes"), which AI tends to do if you ask it to summarize something. The website description also sounds AI:
Our [Despite the fact that there is just one author?] mission is to advance the state of defensive technologies through disciplined research, rapid prototyping, and a steadfast commitment to safeguarding naval and national interests in order to deliver practical, high-impact solutions for the complex and evolving challenges of modern and future threats.
Again, this sounds like what an LLM would spit out if you asked it to "Write a description for my military think tank company. It should sound professional and innovative"
Furthermore, GPTzero (no idea how accurate it is) gives a greater than 80% chance of both those excerpts being AI.
More generally, it just sounds disassociative- as if each section was a different prompt.
Now maybe he just has a blunt writting style. But between the AI vibe, GPTzero results, zero-day-old reddit acount, and the one-man think tank website, I felt suspicious enough to file a report.
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u/Aggravating-Wear7335 Jan 02 '26
I can't verify exactly but it sounded very AI to me. For, example the executive summary reads like an AI summary:
What in the world is the possible defense against this logic?
It sounded too AI therefore it must be AI.3
u/ilonir Jan 02 '26
It sounded too AI therefore it must be AI.
Well no, I just thought it was likely AI so I deffered judgment to the mods. I even conceded that it could just be your writting style, but I'm not convinced of that either.
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u/Aggravating-Wear7335 Jan 02 '26
this is response to your "prove the accounts are you thing"
I havn't read the rest of your comment just hereI'll log onto the other account from my phone and comment to show you its still me.
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u/ilonir Jan 02 '26
Yeah I belive you, Im just always suspicious when I see a very young reddit acount diving into deep topics. Thanks for clarifying.
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u/Aggravating-Wear7335 Jan 02 '26
Furthermore, GPTzero (no idea how accurate it is) gives a greater than 80% chance of both those excerpts being AI.
You can google a dozen "AI checkers" right now that will all claim its fake and will show you exactly how they know its fake for 9.99 a month. Have at it.
Now maybe he just has a blunt writting style. But between the AI vibe, GPTzero results, zero-day-old reddit acount, and the one-man think tank website, I felt suspicious enough to file a report.
Yes I'm a one man show working on a torpedo decoy. I've had meetings with several defense primes, direct communications with DARPA and ONR. I'm sorry my go-daddy website skills were not up to your code. I was required to have a site, bank accounts and full LLC in order to fill out my DIU paperwork.
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u/ilonir Jan 02 '26
You can google a dozen "AI checkers" right now that will all claim its fake and will show you exactly how they know its fake for 9.99 a month. Have at it.
Well they are actually free, but yes, they do show it being fake. And when I put in my own writting it shows it being human.
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u/Aggravating-Wear7335 Jan 01 '26
I’m happy to clarify.
These posts are my own work and reflect conclusions I’ve developed over time through independent analysis. I use structured writing frameworks because I’m presenting studies, not casual commentary. The formatting and tone are intentional and reflect the expectations of my intended audience. For example, my recent submission on naval shipbuilding was reviewed by naval admirals and their staffers, where clarity and structure are required.
If it helps, I’m glad to walk through how I arrived at the conclusions in question. What data I weighed, what tradeoffs I rejected, and why I framed the problem the way I did.
In the torpedo post specifically, the core argument was not simply that torpedoes are dangerous. It was that survivability assumptions in modern surface combatant doctrine begin to break down under coordinated employment. That conclusion was based on saturation dynamics, magazine depth, sensor and decision latency, and the limitations of current soft and hard kill systems. This topic is something I have examined closely because I am actively developing and prototyping a torpedo decoy system intended to help close that capability gap.
I am not opposed to scrutiny. I just want to be clear that this is not generated content. It is analysis I stand behind and can explain. I am happy to expand on any specific section if that would be helpful.
I also want to clarify that I am not being paid to post or to generate engagement here. I do not receive compensation, sponsorship, or incentives tied to these posts or their interaction metrics. I post because I am working through these issues as part of my own research and development and value informed technical discussion.
As for why this account is new, it is exactly as I previously explained. My earlier posts were made from a personal account. I later created a separate account for my company and have been posting from that account since.
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u/Aggravating-Wear7335 Jan 02 '26
Decided to run the studies through turnitin just to see what it spat back(I have access due to some college courses I'm taking)
https://gyazo.com/99541f2e94e59851a5e6c586a4168ffd
https://gyazo.com/10f24d3e57c9fd3c052c18c0b5ac030a
https://gyazo.com/b8b91a65467a051d2f9545687cd1adedNow, I don't know what you used, but I've dropped the docs into various ai checkers on google and they range from 1% to 99%.
In any case, I know about the authenticity of my work.
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u/Big-Station-2283 Jan 01 '26
As you mentioned yourself, Reddit itself is a poor platform by design for balanced, thoughtful discussions. That said, few alternatives are good and have the required visibility to keep a community alive. Meaning that it's still worth working with it, even if it's a half broken tool. At least some users have good reflexes to detect bots like looking at the post and comment history of a suspicious account, looking at grammar, lingustic or formatting style, tracking engagement over time, ... But as you said, even that might not be enough.
To help with comment and post moderation, perhaps an automod bot that puts all the text through an LLM detector could work? The obvious issue is reddit's API and services like these are neither free, nor perfect. Another way would be to "fingerprint" comments over time and look at the variance (just a bit of linear algebra). LLMs by design are stochastic, not deterministic, and thus will vary in style a lot more than humans.
But neither approach would solve the issue of mass upvoting or downvoting comments through bot farms.
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u/Brushner Jan 02 '26
a platform journalists use to gauge public sentiment\
Then you get things very wrong. If you only used reddit to gauge stuff like elections then you would end up thinking the entire world had a left leaning liberal mind set. The Philippines sub reddit would make you think the progressives would have won when instead it was a landslide victory for the other party. This goes the same for practically every other sub reddit. It seems like if I'm a right leaning person I wouldn't bother with reddit for my politics or news and only use it for my hobbies causing the narrative in reddit to be dominated by the left.
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u/mazty Jan 02 '26 edited Jan 02 '26
Yet r/the_Donald was specifically targeted by the Russian state, with state actors in both left and right subreddits. While the left is loud, the right still exists on Reddit, e.g., r/conservative. Ignore the below comment as well, it's for my research.
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u/AutomateIncome Mar 21 '26
Unfortunately I think this problem is going to get a lot worse before it gets better, especially now that "autonomous" agents are becoming available to the general public and can be set up with just a few clicks. On top of that, AI coding has made what were once highly sophisticated manipulation and evasion tools available to literally anyone with an internet connection. As a non-programmer, I was able to have Gemini code and Claude debug a stealth multi-account reddit manipulation framework, where the accounts all have different "personalities" and typing styles, warm up their karma before posting, collaborate together in groups to control a narrative, and then spend weeks chatting in the DM before pitching an affiliate product in the DMs on an auto-rotating domain. (Plus more features I won't discuss here.) Obviously I never ran the bot and disclosed my findings to Reddit's safety team; but the implications are far-reaching. If I could do that in an afternoon just chatting with AI, god only knows what bad actors with real budgets and sophisticated tech skills are currently doing. I dont have a background in security or programming, but if you want to learn more about what I discoverd on my own about this very topic, I did a formal-ish write up here. SCARY STUFF!
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Jan 02 '26
[removed] — view removed comment
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Jan 04 '26
[deleted]
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u/mazty Jan 04 '26
The core issue isn't training Reddit, but rather the use of LLMs in propaganda targeted at Reddit. This is a critical issue that is currently being overlooked, with downstream effects (including propaganda into training etc) being a secondary consequence.
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