However, the site faces issues concerning credibility of conversations on subreddits and inconsistent approaches to moderation.<\/p>\n
“Reddit’s biggest weakness is that credibility can look like consensus, like most other social media sites and their algorithms,” says Dr Yusuf Oc, senior lecturer in marketing at Bayes Business School in London.<\/p>\n
“Upvotes reward what a community likes, not what is true, so you can get information cascades, groupthink, and strong echo chambers in certain subreddits.”<\/p>\n
Creating a decentralised site reliant on moderators has also proved problematic at times.<\/p>\n
“The platform is also unevenly moderated, and quality varies massively by community,” say Oc.<\/p>\n
There are several ways a subreddit can be manipulated. “Brigading” involves a coordinated attack by social media users on another group. In Reddit that would be a group of users looking to manipulate the conversation or voting pattern on a subreddit.<\/p>\n
“Astroturfing”, is another issue, where the true sponsor of a campaign is hidden behind a grassroots initiative.<\/p>\n
Oc says that Reddit is vulnerable to such coordinated influence operations, which can push content up or bury it quickly.<\/p>\n
“Narratives can be amplified or suppressed through coordinated activity and social pressure within communities. Moderators are volunteers so they can face pressure from highly-motivated groups, harassment, or sustained reporting campaigns, and because norms differ by subreddit, enforcement can be inconsistent.”<\/p>\n
In its defence a Reddit spokesperson said: “Reddit’s policies prohibit manipulated content and inauthentic behaviour and our safety teams enforce these rules with a combination of human review and sophisticated automated tooling that can detect this content at scale.<\/p>\n
“On top of this, Reddit’s community moderators set and enforce subreddit-specific rules that can be even stricter.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"However, the site faces issues concerning credibility of conversations on subreddits and inconsistent approaches to moderation. “Reddit’s biggest…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":430123,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20],"tags":[554,733,4308,86,56,54,55],"class_list":{"0":"post-430122","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-artificial-intelligence","8":"tag-ai","9":"tag-artificial-intelligence","10":"tag-artificialintelligence","11":"tag-technology","12":"tag-uk","13":"tag-united-kingdom","14":"tag-unitedkingdom"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/430122","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=430122"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/430122\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/430123"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=430122"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=430122"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=430122"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}