What I don’t get is that isn’t he supposed to be considered innocent until actually proven guilty in a court of law? All this censorship is missing the point of rule of law.

DISAGREE BUTTON PRESSED

NO GODS MASTERS NO REDDIQUETTE

I genuinely think a large proportion of Reddit posts have been automated for at least the last 5 years. I’m sure the constant repetition of the exact same jokes and threads can be partially attributed to real users repeating things, but frequently it seemed like things would get repeated multiple times a day for months (or indefinitely). Any thread on specific topics would invariably wind up with the exact same responses.

Anything to do with Russia? “Hope they don’t fall out a window.”

Anything to do with any type of disease, in literally any animal or microorganism? “This is how the zombie apocalypse starts.”

Literally anything political? “Gaslight, Obstruct, Project” with a usually arbitrary “<—you are here” thrown in. Confoundingly would even pop up in non-american threads sometimes.

I’m sure there are many, many more examples that are slipping my mind now since it’s been years since I’ve browsed Reddit proper, but the point is this type of manufactured popularity has been possible even before the advent of LLMs. Now the systems could be far more complex.

These companies literally survive on showing advertisers how much traffic they have. Even if the bots aren’t run by the social media companies themselves, they have no incentive to remove bots, only to disguise them as real visitors. It’s a very small jump from that to only allowing posts that express certain opinions to hit the big time. In all likelihood that’s the real reason they introduced vote fuzzing in the first place.