Where to sell my car reddit
Reddit For Sale: How We Bought The Top Spot For $200 (reupload)
this story about reddit spot and
shilling problem was published at the
end of 2016 just as fake news became a
thing we even managed to get a fake news
story to the top of two informational
subreddits this is our very first story
so less than we think and don't forget
to like and share a couple of weeks ago
we got two made-up stories onto the
front page of Reddit for less than $200
reddit is the 25th most popular website
in the world in the United States it's
the 11th most popular website in fact it
gets about 230 million unique visitors
every month and for the people that do
use it they check back regularly each
day
the idea behind reddit is simple create
community around a particular topic and
submit stories and upvote the good ones
and downvote the bad ones
the discussion section works in the
exact same way up for insightful
comments and downvote
the spammers this system provides news
and information for thousands of news
blogs and web sites all over the
Internet it's show influential it even
attracts top celebrities academics and
even the president and with so many
people taking part in these
conversations every day its influence is
actually felt in the real world
take Bernie Sanders for example his
unpredictable rise can largely be
attributed to reddit with so much
influence should we be surprised that
people are trying to game the website
for their own benefit I have for the
past six maybe seven months then
actively manipulating what you all see
and hear in the news in general
redditors trusted that system of up
voting and down voting protects their
conversations from outside influence but
that trust in their content makes them a
powerful target for advertisers and any
external organization with a particular
agenda some red
have started to suspect the external
influences are having an effect on the
conversation specifically what I've been
studying is website called reddit and I
wrote a computer program every two
minutes Zoe's to reddit.com gets the
most recent post and randomly without
looking at the title I upload it or I
download it the results are pretty
astounding if I were to upload something
initially the final score on average is
quite a bit higher than the average
score for any post if I downvote
something initially then the average
score is much much lower than if I would
have done nothing at all again this is
just one small nudge one tiny push and I
could change what happens online so
could a company get organized and start
to have an impact on the news that gets
through to our news feed each morning me
and Sam quartz up via Skype it only
takes three or four or five votes to
have a sizeable impact and so if you can
control three or four or five votes that
is you know five people working in some
firm then that can do a lot of work it
seems incredible but Tim's research
shows that just a small number of
accounts can have a massive impact on
these subreddits and this exact scenario
actually played out in the Bitcoin
subreddit Bitcoin is a cryptocurrency
that has our missions to replace the
cash in our wallet and we spoke to the
moderator of the subreddit Bochco he
told us that people supportive of
bitcoins vision were being automatically
downloaded every single time they posted
and for editors that were critical of
bitcoins vision they were being
automatically uploaded all of the
usernames you can see here have been
targeted in an automated attack we were
impressed with bashkirs research and we
were impressed with Tim's research but
we wanted to test it ourselves so we
started an investigation to see how easy
it would be to buy fake reddit accounts
[Music]
hey how you doing thanks for answering
my call so I believe that you shall read
it accounts is that true yes great so
where do you buy your accounts from I'm
interested to know I have like the black
Kevlar from big plain form which are the
best accounts I can buy from you thank
you so much for helping me understand
how it works thank you bye bye
[Music]
in less than an hour
we bought multiple fake accounts and
hundreds of upvotes
for less than $200 now we needed a story
so we faked up a character
Espen Lunt he's a professor of economics
from a Norwegian University and we
submitted a terrible factually
inaccurate story to medium we submitted
the story to Reddit United Kingdom with
our fake accounts and used up votes to
get it to hit the front page we've made
a positive case for brexit and started a
conversation about that topic on the UK
subreddit the headline stayed in its
high position for a number of hours and
Tim welling her explain to us why this
is important unless the post is removed
by the volunteer moderators the fake
headline border made very few reddit
users actually click through to read the
article even fewer read the comment
section most ready users are headline
browsers in the social digital media
movement headline visibility is key most
influence of ranking which dictates the
visibility of a post highly visible post
attracts more votes which further
increases the ranking and visibility our
first attempt had been successful but
what about if we went after a bigger
fish reddit videos has 12 million
subscribers would it be possible for us
to fake a story here well we submitted a
story to the subreddit we're using one
of our fake accounts it was a link to
season 2 trailer of narcos the title was
clearly an advert and then we bought
thousands of up votes from our contacts
we sat and watched this story rock it up
the front page as soon enough this fake
advert was at the number one spot and it
generated a huge and largely positive
conversation about the new season 2 of
narcos only a few redditors in the
comment section spotted that this was an
advert and we down voted those people
and anyone who is being positive about
the show we up voted them thus we had
completely skewed the conversations tone
a tool like this is the holy grail for
advertisers why because people any
people are more likely to accept a
message if they believe people in their
group have done the same
this fact was explicitly stated in
leaked GCHQ documents provided by Edward
Snowden it was written to help cyber
magicians disrupt deny and dissuade
online conversations we've proven the
reddit popularity can be bought and paid
for with simple online services and this
is clearly a huge problem right now
there is no way to tell whether reddits
enthusiasm for a particular idea or
product is real or bought and paid for
by some shady organization people argue
that reddit is just a website but we
think this is unfair its influence is
felt right across the internet and we've
demonstrated that it's news finds its
way into our feeds every morning we
share our investigation with Reddit but
it did not respond before publishing
I've been Phil Harper this is being
point further reading check out the
links in the description like our page
follow us on YouTube and we'll see you
again next time
[Music]
you
