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Comment by etjossem | Hacker News Reader

From your source:

- The DNC was not paying Correct The Record. Like all super PACs, Correct The Record made independent expenditures on behalf of supportive donors around the country, and you can find their names here: https://www.opensecrets.org/pacs/pacgave2.php?cycle=2016&cmt...

- Correct The Record had about a dozen full-time content producers writing favorable posts about the Democratic candidate online.

I'm not seeing any references to improper payments made by the DNC, nor do I see the Reddit connection. While we're on the topic of independent expenditures, would you like to talk about the 328 million Russian Twitter accounts that were used in the general election to produce paid pro-Trump content?

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/07/us/politics/russia-facebo...

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> The DNC was not paying Correct The Record as you claim; they were independently funded by donors around the country, all of whom are listed here:

Super PACs have NEVER taken advice or worked directly with national campaigns. (they verifiably do)

> Correct The Record had about a dozen full-time content producers writing favorable posts about the Democratic candidate online.

> If this was supposed to be your evidence of a vast DNC conspiracy to ruin Reddit, I'm incredibly disappointed.

I would say reddit going from a place that once supported open and free ideas, to one that only pretends to, is a very dangerous thing. Shilling is real, people are paid to do it. On both sides. Clearly the left wing has the advantage on reddit.

> And given the 328 million Russian Twitter accounts used in the general election to produce paid pro-Trump content, do you really want to have this conversation?

NYtimes writing slam pieces about our president? More fake russian collusion stories? Color me shocked. I don't trust the media, and neither should you. The whole Russia story is hogwash.

Thank You for Correcting The Record!

Zing!

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

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.

Is it possible that those users were deleted after this was revealed?

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.

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.

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_...

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.

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