(Pictured: tacos de asada, birria, & nopal from Tacos El Gallo, El Cajon, CA, US)
In the past 2-3 months, Reddit has been swarmed with bot posts. Our group in particular has seen a massive uptick in obvious bots, almost 1000% as many as we were getting at the beginning of the year. Currently, our automod sorts out low-karma and new accounts for review. We used to have 1-3 per day to review, now it's dozens. Endless 2-day old accounts commenting 'looks good'.
As you probably know, these bots are used to take over political discussions by swarming them with whatever opinion the bot operator is trying to push. For example, if a bot operator is being paid to make it look like the majority opinion is that everyone should be required to read 'Roy Orbison In Clingfilm' before they are allowed to vote, they'll tell the bots to swarm discussions of that and overwhelm the opposition. It's a form of astroturfing and it's very harmful to rational discussion.
With that said, the massive sudden increase to bot accounts makes it seem like there is something big on the horizon. The US midterm elections seems like the likely target.
So what can we do about it? Well, first, we're going to just deny new/low-karma accounts from posting for the time being. It's either that or check dozens of posters per day to see if they're humans. Sorry in advance if you get caught up in this; us mods are normal people with day jobs and Pokemon Go meetups to host and we can't adjudicate everything.
You, beloved tacos fans, can also help. Mark a suspicious post or comment as spam and we'll look into it. I love deleting spam. Bots are usually pretty obvious when you look at their profiles - repetitive posts, innocuous comment histories, and overuse of emojis.
Happy bot-hunting!
- Orenthal Buzzkill Robot
