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A comment on Reddit Co-Founder Alexis Ohanian Steps Aside, Focuses on Initialized Capital. Parent comment

Re:Reddit Co-Founder Alexis Ohanian Steps Aside, Focuses on ... by Karunamon on Wednesday February 07, 2018 @03:24PM (#16327672)
Why the whataboutism here? No, I would not like to address these accounts and the questionable methodology that was used to get that "328 million" number, because it's irrelevant to the question.

As to the question, the answer unfortunately requires some familiarity with Reddit and having been a regular user there for a while. /r/politics is the big one since it was a "default" community up until that concept was eliminated a while ago (basically it was automatically on the front page if you browsed the site while logged out, and if you made an account, you were automatically subscribed to it).

I bring them up, because they're the largest political community on the site, and had a level of privilege that comes with that.

CTR is used as shorthand for the pro-Hillary tonal shift in /r/politics that happened fairly rapidly[1], combined with fairly obvious botting[2]. While there's no proof that any particular organization was responsible for those posts, or that Reddit's owners tacitly permitted their behavior, CTR is to my knowledge the only organization who had social network promotion (beyond the usual writing their own obvious posts or buying ads) of Hillary Clinton as its goal, going to the point of addressing actual individuals. AFAIK, this is new.

[1]: https://www.thedailybeast.com/hillary-pac-spends-dollar1-mil...

[2]: https://i.imgur.com/uYZuRBc.jpg

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Reddit Co-Founder Alexis Ohanian Steps Aside, Focuses on ... by etjossem on Wednesday February 07, 2018 @03:34PM (#16327753)
I did some digging, and your evidence of "obvious pro-Hillary botting" (your [2] above) is an alt-right photoshop. They couldn't find any real evidence of this happening, so they fabricated their own. Here's how.

The William_Trevino post is a real post on Reddit that was used as a template:

https://www.reddit.com/r/politics/search?q=author%3AWilliam_...

But all the other "FirstName_LastName" entries were edited in by the creator of the image. Unlike William_Trevino's entry, they have no associated Reddit post. You can try to find users by those names or posts with those entries' title, but they don't exist.

- https://www.reddit.com/r/politics/search?q=author%3AHoward_L...

- https://www.reddit.com/r/politics/search?q=author%3ATerry_Mo... etc.

I've gone ahead and flagged you for posting a completely deceptive photoshop of the truth. Please make an effort to fact-check yourself next time.

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Reddit Co-Founder Alexis Ohanian Steps Aside, Focuses on ... by pentagonpapers on Wednesday February 07, 2018 @03:57PM (#16327925)
Is it possible that those users were deleted after this was revealed?
[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Reddit Co-Founder Alexis Ohanian Steps Aside, Focuses on ... by Karunamon on Wednesday February 07, 2018 @04:47PM (#16328322)
That appears to be what has happened. Contrary to etjossem's post, Google still has the history of their posts.

howard_lowery: https://www.reddit.com/r/politics/comments/4vm8e2/paul_ryan_...

john_valtierra: https://www.reddit.com/r/politics/comments/4vm7zz/could_sput...

frank_calder: https://www.reddit.com/r/politics/comments/4vm88x/donald_tru...

terry_moore: https://www.reddit.com/r/politics/comments/4vm79m/khizr_khan...

carlos_liu: https://www.reddit.com/r/politics/comments/4vm8xn/donald_tru...

All appear to be single-purpose accounts that only posted in /r/politics, all are currently banned or deleted.

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Reddit Co-Founder Alexis Ohanian Steps Aside, Focuses on ... by etjossem on Wednesday February 07, 2018 @06:52PM (#16329022)
Okay - you're right. I'm surprised none of those show up in a title search. Reddit's search feature must be broken, because title queries are supposed to show even if the author is deleted.

So it looks like someone did make super obvious sockpuppets that posted some pro-Democrat content once. I still don't think you can generalize that to a trend - certainly nothing on the order of the Russian bots. If anything, /r/politics had a reputation at the time of being extremely favorable to conservatives.

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Reddit Co-Founder Alexis Ohanian Steps Aside, Focuses on ... by etjossem on Wednesday February 07, 2018 @03:59PM (#16327939)
Nope. The fake entries added by the photoshopper don't even produce any associated posts in title search results [1]. If they were real posts from a deleted user, they'd still appear in title queries with [deleted] as their author. [2]

It's a photoshop and you've been lied to. I hope this teaches you to think more critically about things, especially when they're what you want to believe. Thanks for playing.

[1] https://www.reddit.com/search?q=title%3APaul+Ryan+Sides+with...

[2] https://www.reddit.com/r/help/comments/18ejnd/are_old_posts_...

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Reddit Co-Founder Alexis Ohanian Steps Aside, Focuses on ... by Karunamon on Wednesday February 07, 2018 @04:40PM (#16328267)
Your methodology is flawed. I just searched my own Reddit account which I deleted early 2015, which was around for five years and had thousands of comments and 100ish posts, and it identically returns no results of any kind.

https://www.reddit.com/search?q=author%3A+Karunamon&sort=rel...

Now, if we take the same search to Google, you see [deleted] posts by me, and posts that reference my name:

https://www.google.com/search?source=hp&ei=cnF7WqfTHI7ctQXJt...

If we grab a random account from that image, say frank_calder, we get results:

https://www.google.com/search?ei=n3F7WqD7E8W2sAXu1ZzIBg&q=si...

Including one that calls out the botted nature of that account by name:

https://www.reddit.com/r/videos/comments/4vsk1e/a_tour_of_ac...

And with some more digging, we can turn up their actual posts:

howard_lowery: https://www.reddit.com/r/politics/comments/4vm8e2/paul_ryan_...

john_valtierra: https://www.reddit.com/r/politics/comments/4vm7zz/could_sput...

frank_calder: https://www.reddit.com/r/politics/comments/4vm88x/donald_tru...

terry_moore: https://www.reddit.com/r/politics/comments/4vm79m/khizr_khan...

carlos_liu: https://www.reddit.com/r/politics/comments/4vm8xn/donald_tru...

Reddit's search is and always has been awful.

This accounts for every user called out on that image. I'd thank you not to call me a liar in the future.

I've gone ahead and not flagged you because I don't abuse the flag feature against people who make mistakes, given your utterly baseless and easily disproved assertion that those accounts were photoshopped onto this image.

[ Parent | on HN ]