Are the ratings of your favorite blog posts being manipulated by paid groups? A recent Motherboard Article explains an experiment that did just that.
This is a problem that many here are aware of being an issue on many of the sites we visit but I still wanted to post this. A public apology from a study group may help to open the eyes of some people we know or at least make them more skeptical of what they think is a “popular” or “unpopular” opinion/comment by someone on many sites that are regularly visited. Those ratings have influence on some people as to what they believe is a valid response to a comment.
*(Note: I have found KOS to be Exceptionally good at keeping trolls at bay. Kudos!)
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Recently the researchers from consulting firm Thinkst took to Reddit to apologize for flooding subreddits like /r/worldnews and /r/netsec with fake accounts to game votes as part of a study last year. They were less successful on /r/worldnews due to the higher user activity, but they were still able to down vote posts into obscurity—from 70 points to 30, for example. This study documents just how easy it is to manipulate perceptions on public sites.
Now…who here didn’t already at least suspect the HEAVY use of these tactics on Many political sites by corporations with the resources to do this in a Big way? (I expect 0 hands to be raised!)
“We had dutifully reported all of the bugs we found during the research and were pretty open and public about the results and report,” Haroon Meer, one of the study’s authors, told me in an email. “Reporting the results to the Reddit mods completely fell through the cracks.”
Their next step is to build a tool that can automatically detect fake accounts working in concert. That’s good news, because apparently taking advantage of a site meant to encourage community-building is really easy to do, and pretty difficult to stop.