Detecting Russian Bots on Reddit | Hacker News Reader

Detecting Russian Bots on Reddit

briannorlander.com

31 pointsthereyougo4 comments

I found the frequency and intensity of crypto currency involvement, across many communities, very interesting and enlightening in this post. Beyond just creating political turmoil, there's a case to investigate further just how much the Russians were involved in building and collapse a massive economy.

Incredible analysis. I wish there was more! In my experience over the last few months on r/politics, the bots are extremely easy to detect just by reading the new feeds (especially in megathreads, they are everywhere).

For example, the most common elements are:

- repeated copy+paste comments (every 5 minutes or so) that follow the pattern: "I'm literally shaking and crying, I'm a democrat and so lost! Everything is over! Trump is innocent and I'm literally crying". Various accounts will comment various interpretations of this every few minutes.

- "lololol trump is innocent, where is your apology stupid libs" Intentional lowercase, no care for grammar, and direct insults to "the left". Again, these will repeat from the same accounts and others every few minutes

- "now that the report shows exoneration and the president will be indicted you libs lose!" No understanding of the words' meanings. Using 'indicted' to mean the opposite of what it means without knowing, etc.

- Most of the comments will be deleted after being called out, or will be deleted within 30 minutes regardless

- "the report says no more charges will be filed, maga!" Again this is just a lie, total fabrication with no basis in reality.

- The bots will all align around a few "talking points" where they all use the same words and phrasing. These can last just a few days or sometimes you'll see the same ones for months. The "talking points" often have nothing to do with the news of the day and seem to be meant as distraction or other disinformation

- The common theme among all of them is that they spread lies, use coordinated disinformation campaigns, and aim to confuse and distract from reality.

The reality, of course, is the Russia is attacking the United States, our elections in 2016 were compromised and broken completely, and that we now have an illegitimate government that enables the attacks from Russia to continue.

Democracy is under attack. The Russian bots on reddit are easy to spot and hilarious to deal with, until you realize how much damage they are actively causing. From my eye, it seems like the attacks have dramatically ramped up recently - but I don't have the hard data to show it. Just my experience calling out Russian bots on reddit in the r/politics megathreads.

> The common theme among all of them is that they spread lies, use coordinated disinformation campaigns, and aim to confuse and distract from reality.

Judging from the examples you gave, I disagree with this conclusion. It looks more like they're trying to make liberals and conservatives look bad to each other, by playing up stereotypes. The primary aim seems to be to divide.

Okay, but my summaries don't do it justice. Unfortunately for those not there for the events, it is difficult to communicate what it is like. Imagine the human time wasted when dozens of people reply "oh honey don't get so upset, it's okay, that's not what the report says, here's a link" etc. The number of human-hours wasted with good-intentioned people trying to make the bots feel better is a sad sad sad thought ....so much time wasted.

They also talk to each other, creating super confusion about who is real and who is not. Maybe those responses are written by bots too, to make us think some are real?

The sheer quantity of lies, especially lies that have nothing to do with the topic at all, leads me to believe the aim is a lot more than "to divide". The aim is also to disinform and to waste time of good people, who could be doing more important things but now feel they have to stop the spread of lies.

I apologize for my sample being incomplete and the summaries not sufficient. You really have to be there in the trenches seeing it happen. Check the next big news megathreads and you'll see it.

100s of comments per minute, many of them fraudulent and full of lies. You can go there and pick apart the details yourself to come to your own conclusions about it.

But you have to go there live - they delete their comments so rapidly that future study of the events is very difficult.

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