Welcome back to smarter every day.

Unfortunately, now is the time for the video about disinformation on Reddit, the front page of the Internet.

It's been documented by both the European Union and the United States of America that Russia, Iran, China are all spreading disinformation online about the Corona virus pandemic, which, to be clear, can kill you.

If you don't know the right things about the pandemic, you can die.

So why would they do that?

This is the fourth video in a series on disinformation.

We've already covered YouTube, Twitter and Facebook.

Okay, Read it does not want disinformation on the platform.

In fact, they're doing a ton to try to fight against it.

But the question is, how do you fight disinformation without giving up?

What makes read it so powerful a place to freely exchange ideas with other people anonymously.

Today we're gonna talk about this tension and, more importantly, how it affects you and I as Reddit users to learn about this.

Let's go get smarter every day and talk to the experts were to speak to Chris Slow, the chief technology officer at Read it and then we'll go to Rene.

Duress tha at the Stanford Internet Observatory.

We'll talk on the phone with John at the Oxford Internet Institute and then Jeremy Blackburn at the eye drama lab.

It's a group of scientists and academics that use math and science to try to detect this stuff.

All right, first off, let's go to actual Reddit headquarters, something I've always wanted to do.

We're gonna meet Chris slow, chief technology officer, and get this conversation started against me.

Start here.

Yeah.

Who controls?

Read it.

Somebody controls.

Ready?

Oh, but I mean red.

It is.

It's the front page of the Internet.

Like you go to read it in, like, whatever's on that front page, it influences culture for that day.

I think the actual answer is like everybody who uses read it controls.

Read it in some in some way, you won't be able to vote or down Vote yes, function of, you know, if the community likes that content.

And so so, yeah, the next letter is the moderator.

So every every community has its own set of moderators and they enforce their own set of rules.

And so they get a chance to set the tone of their community so they can take down anything that wants directly think, just remove it.

Um, and they can set the rules to be as strict auras looses they want to be.

The underlying important unit is not the content or the user, but the communities that are built on the platform is coordinated.

An authentic behavior problem on red.

I mean, it's it's definitely a problem we constantly work to prevent.

I'm gonna say, like there will always be examples of things that hit the front page that potentially shouldn't be there.

That's kind of like a nature of the platform, right?

Because you're dealing with a bunch of people, right?

And so, um, you know, you know, extreme example would be you Click Bait is a thing like titles that are suggestive.

That'll get you to click through.

We're like, you know, um, but what we try to do is those two parts of it.

One is users have an opportunity to reconsider their vote after seeing the content secondarily, and you have the download available to them.

There's a way to kind of like degrade any any inauthentic like Baber that happens your side of it is like, you know, we put a lot of work over the last decade and change into maintaining a certain, like sanctity of the vote.

Um, you know, the joke I usually use is that, um we can't every vote, but it doesn't mean that every vote counts, right?

And so we have to be able to come up with, um, you know, based on based on behavior is knowing that there's some adversary on the far side.

Was trying to basically game that our system have a set of somewhat opaque ways to hide what counts and what doesn't.

But at the same time, make sure that we're not throwing the baby out with the bathwater right like we do.

We do wanna have things that are popular, manifest themselves as popular.

But during that very early formative time, that really first couple of votes is what's really critical.

That's where it's a lot of scrutiny around making sure that, you know, there's not like a game going on where you know it's it's me and my 50,000 clones that are all coming from the same computer in the same I P address or counting towards that boat you can think of it like this Kind of a tiered system for how we deal with the content appears on Reddit.

At least we're, like the like, the enforcement side of things like the removal of side of things.

The last line of defense is us, like that company.

You know, the ad mons a cz were over for doing the platform.

Um, we our job is to enforce, like, site wide policy violations, like, you know, copyright violations, anything that violates our content policy.

You know, harassment, spam on all that great fun stuff, Um, are appearing in places like the last line of defense.

It's like the it's like you're sitting in the National Guard to clean up like a giant mess.

Okay, so you're saying when Reddit employees get involved?

Yeah, that's a rare thing.

That's a relatively rare thing.

Just a personal observation read.

It seems to be way more hands off when it comes to this stuff than other social media platforms, but it's also way more community focused.

Grenade Arrested has a ton of experience studying this information online, so I asked her what she thought about this community driven approach.

There's an interesting idea there, which is that the community should decide what kind of content it wants to tolerate.

Right?

And so you do see things like, I think there's a subreddit where you can only post a picture of a cat.

And if you post a picture of a dog like you know, it's deleted and band and nobody goes in there and screams that they're being censored because they couldn't post the dog into the cat subreddit.

So it's interesting in light of like the moderation challenges faced by, like Twitter and Facebook, where there's this expectation that one moderation standard is fit for the whole community.

I do think read it is an interesting experiment, seeing how that much more hands on moderation kind of activity works.

And then also, when the community reports these weird accounts coming in, there is a little bit more of like, you know, you as a member of that community have a better sense of like where that uncanny valley is.

We're like the contents, not quite right.

The the person typing the account like, you know, sort of person typing the comment gets it just a little bit wrong.

They don't understand community.

Yeah, exactly.

And so there is like I do believe that read it has a unique, that community moderated kind of point of view for detecting anything from disinformation to harassment.

At the same time, we do see these accounts get through right, And so the question is also what's their top level strategy for managing and detecting and being proactive?

Recognizing that platform is a target for state sponsored actors.

Is it enough to rely on community mods?

Or is there also something in place?

Thio have, ah, top level view that's doing a little bit more of the investigative type work that Facebook and Twitter we're doing.

So when speaking to Renee and Chris, we talked about up vote manipulation down vote manipulation brigade ing.

There's all kinds of manipulation that can take place on Reddit, and those discussions are pretty long, so I'll leave them over on the second channel at some point.

But for now, there was one little nugget that fell out of the conversation with Chris from Reddit that I think other Reddit Er's might appreciate.

One of the one of those size and various things on Reddit has been that the the upload to dammit ratio consistent over 14 years.

I don't know what that even means.

7 to 1.

There's been seven up votes consistently to every down vote cast on the site.

It's just I don't really I don't get it, but it's Ah, it's a thing that's always happened.

Some city where Jeremy Blackburn.

He's from Binghamton University in New York, the top public university in New York.

And he runs this thing or at least participates in this thing called the I Drama Lab, which I don't really understand what you are.

Could you please explain the high drama lab for me?

Yeah, sure.

So I drama lab, where a group of international scientists and, um, we specialize in getting a under, having a large scale, a very wide and high level view, holistic view of the Internet as a whole.

So we don't just look at Twitter or just read it or just Facebook.

We look at it all, and we focus really on understanding the connections between them, the hidden connections between them and other chunks of the web.

Um, this is really important.

We think we're you know, we're pretty good at it.

Um it's our niche.

And ah, we do our job there.

I got it.

So let me just ask you this straight up then.

Is there some type of large scale, coordinated inauthentic activity on Reddit?

Is that a thing?

Yes.

Absolutely, Really.

The Internet has a long history of people pretending to be something they're not.

Ah, and the Internet kind of enables that.

So no, I don't I don't I don't want to say that everybody you see, that's acting a little bit weird.

Is is some kind of bad actor.

There are people that are new to communities have to learn the rules.

You know, maybe they are interested.

They just haven't learned the culture yet.

But it's not crazy to be on the lookout for this stuff.

It does happen.

There are active campaigns, toe abuse, social media and influence opinion.

So what you saying?

Ah, we're seeing that there's a lot of content going on right now, especially with Corona virus.

Unfortunately, we see that a lot of this stuff appears to be effective.

Still, um, it there's not we haven't noticed yet.

At least any kind of news, particularly new strategies they're being used, were still seeing kind of the same basic strategies that were 23 years ago because they still work.

I guess one thing I didn't get from the Reddit interview is they were kind of top.

Chris was kind of top level.

He didn't really dive down and say, Oh, yeah, user surfing Injured 385 Did this.

Do you have, like, a specific example of a time when someone's trying to manipulate read it?

Yeah, there's so red it's actually put out their stuff.

There's a reddit dot com slash wiki slash suspicious accounts and on that site what they did and actually give him a lot of credit for doing this.

Following the 2016 election read, it acknowledged 944 troubles that have been active on her platform, and it did a very detailed transparency report in early 2017 Way was late 2017 but they did a really detailed transparency report where they actually go through, and you can see that the user Reuben Jer, for example, has karma of 99,400 It looks like and read it for a while.

I had left these accounts up, um, and so you could actually kind of click in there and you could see what they were, who they were, where they were posting to.

And that was where you could start to see that they were posting to some of the funny name sights in the black community Subreddit.

It's some of the far right community Subreddit on DSO, To their credit, read, it did actually make this visible to the public.

They kept them up there for quite some time.

Just an interesting choice.

It is because Facebook took it all down, even though they flagged the accounts.

When I first heard that read, it was leaving up access to both posts and comments from known Russian agents who were trying to manipulate us.

I thought that was a really odd decision on Red.

It's part.

But when I went to the public link Reddit security provided of all the known trouble accounts, I realized that this was actually valuable.

It lets you study the context of the comments and the post to understand how these disinformation campaigns work.

At the time this particular troll operation was underway, the strategy seemed to be an attempt to use the hot button issues of the day in order to rile up Americans on both sides of any argument, all the while making sure to cycle in a good helping of low effort, cute animal repost to try to throw red it security and other users off the scent.

At the time of these post in 2015 and 2016 they clearly focused on racism and police issues.

They would go from Subreddit to separate it, hoping that it would explode and make everyone fight and create a CZ many casualties as possible.

The comments were interesting.

They did one of two things.

They were either camouflage trying to convince other Reddit er's that they were real people or they were inflammatory, hoping to nudge people towards hating each other.

Although there were a few outlier accounts that seemed to be focused more on comments.

If you look at the karma scores of the vast majority of these accounts, the post karma was on average 40 times larger than the comment karma.

So Inflammatory Post seemed to have been the weapon of choice.

That being said, even though the comments seemed to appear less influential, let's take a moment and try to analyze them, to understand the cumulative effect that they did have on the conversation.

I'm on the phone with John from the Oxford Internet Institute, and he's been researching minced information on Red, and he's gonna talk to us a little bit about what he sees in the data.

So you have a report in Robo trolling, which is the magazine NATO Strategic Communications Center Makes quarterly about online disinformation.

You've got a graft down here that I was hoping you could explain to us.

Sure, I'll give it try.

So this was looking at what happens to the Reddick conversations after some manipulations.

So as you got a reddit thread sort of taking along over time, you think of this left to right in each those graphs, another comment.

Another commented on the comment on and then in the middle on the red dotted line we have when a fake account a Russian buyer, a trial account has made a comment.

They've injected something into this into this threat, and then what we have is the baseline, which is tracking along at zero, is essentially a control threat.

So another thread that hasn't been manipulated and then what we see in three lines is how the manipulated conversation diverged.

So what happened?

Where was the change?