alt Hacker News> There are huge influence operations basically on every national sub.
I believe you. But I've also often been accused of being a bot or working for an intelligence service when posting my own opinion in political discussions, not in coordination with anyone at all, and not pretending to be anything I'm not. I think the people accusing me of this did genuinely believe it too.
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From the perspective of a mod, the only thing they end up having is the content, and the current patterns of interference they are familiar with.
So if your opinion happens to be in line with whatever narrative someone is trying to spin up, it will end up getting quashed.
Frankly there isn’t any solution to this, and you either end up losing ground to mechanised speech while having a low ban load for humans, or you end up acting on likely mechanized speech, and have a higher number of humans you ban.
The way Reddit is set up, people will select the first option over the second.
Typically people with long reddit histories aren't 'bots', though there are some cases.
What I typically saw was accounts that had a decent sized but very generic history, things like gaming or cooking. Then suddenly the accounts became very politically motivated over one particular thing. Then within a few weeks to a months the accounts were gone.
My assumption these were sold/farmed accounts with reused comments/boring posts that were then used to push a political message when needed.