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Does Reddit have an astroturfing problem? What the data suggests

312 points · 408 comments · p-s-v

  1. nikanj · · focus · HN ↗
    Absolutely. For example, the blatant ads for Stake <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.reddit.com&#x2F;r&#x2F;self&#x2F;comments&#x2F;1s3yscz&#x2F;how_reddit_users_are_being_maliciously_targeted&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.reddit.com&#x2F;r&#x2F;self&#x2F;comments&#x2F;1s3yscz&#x2F;how_reddit_us...
    1. lurk2 · · focus · HN ↗
      &gt; And here&#x27;s something I found extremely interesting. On the original post, a commentor noticed a strange detail. All of these posts use either the Cyrillic letter &quot;a&#x27;&#x27; or &#x27;&#x27;e&#x27;&#x27; in the word Stake. So aesthetically it looks the same as a normal A or E figure, except its technically not recognized as the normal letter A or E.

      &gt; Why do this? Well, it&#x27;s likely this is done as a means of circumnavigating some subreddits filters to ban mentioning of gambling. The word Stake has likely been filtered out of some subs or mentions of gambling outright banned, and this is a way around it. I noticed too when you utilize Ctrl + F, you cannot find the word &quot;Stake&quot; when searching for it on these posts, due to how these figures are considered different.

      I saw the comment you linked a while ago and looked for some of the phrases on Google and turned up five or six hits before getting bored; there were a lot more in the search results that I never checked. This was also around the time that Kick was showing up everywhere because they had been paying for their clips to appear on other sites.

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