Reddit is Being Manipulated By Big Financial Services Companies
 

Reddit is being regularly manipulated by large financial services companies with fake accounts and fake upvotes via seemingly ordinary internet marketing agencies.

?I work with a number of accounts on Reddit that we can use to change the conversation. And make it a bit more positive.?

This was the startling admission of a professional-looking marketing agency that, in a phone call with me, openly bragged about manipulating conversations on Reddit.

This wasn?t a one-off, nor was it the result of weeks of plumbing the depths of the dark web looking for shilling services. Finding this agency, and several others, took less than a few hours of basic Googling.

The business of Internet shilling - posing as a genuine forum user but being in the employ of a corporation to promote their work - is booming. And it has been for a long time. From fake Amazon reviews to the U.S Army astroturfing social media, comment manipulation is as old as the very concept of internet forums.

Fake comments and fake conversations being hard to spot, especially when they?re made by specialist agencies, makes shilling big business.

Nowhere is this more apparent than on Reddit. Being the world?s 22nd most popular website and the U.S.? 7th makes it a popular target because of the hundreds of millions of eyeballs it attracts every month.

In December last year, I managed to place two entirely fake news stories onto influential subreddits - with millions of subscribers - and vote them to the top with fake accounts and fake upvotes for less than $200. It was simple, cheap and effective.

What I hadn?t realised at the time was how widespread this shilling issue was. Professional marketing agencies, with offices in several different countries, offer these services often under the guise of "reputation management." They don?t specifically talk about manipulating conversations online, instead using coded, dog whistle language like ?targeted techniques? and ?competitor slander.?

But, to verify that these companies are selling professional forum manipulation services, I had to get in contact. So I developed a back story and called a few agencies.

Continued Forbes Welcome

Go to your safe zone and watch Alex Jones cupcake

Deflection.

Sad.