Bad actors never sleep: content manipulation on Reddit

Abstract

The self-proclaimed front page of the internet, Reddit is a many faceted site, described variously as an assemblage of online communities, a social news aggregation website and a social media site. Reddit is one of the most popular sites online both in terms of visitation and interaction. Central to Reddit’s popularity is its active community of users who contribute posts, comments and votes to subreddits resulting in a series of constantly changing bulletin boards comprised of over 3 billion submissions annually. Since its inception in 2005, Reddit has generated polarized engagement and responses to this community activity from wildly positive to highly toxic. Recent developments around perceived political manipulation of and on Reddit and accusations of content manipulation and censorship have raised questions of trust in the Reddit platform. Since 2019 Reddit has sought to identify and mitigate bad actor behaviour, address content manipulation and maintain the site’s authenticity and the historical context of Reddit’s attempts to address each is of central concern to this article. How this history then intersects with contemporary ideas of digital resignation and commons-based models of management informs analysis in the article on moderation practices, opens up new possibilities for future research into concepts of platform literacy and structural (digital) imagination.

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