Evidence of astroturfing in this sub

Over the past few months as I’ve used this subreddit, there has been an increasingly concerning level of possible astroturfing on many posts in this forum.

This worries me as many legitimate stories, images, and videos are usually shot down right in their infancy as soon as they’re posted, with a barrage of ‘authentic’ cynics posting negative or critical comments quickly, almost right after the post is live. This shouldn’t be happening this quickly. If there is a disinformation campaign going on in this subreddit it would be 24/7 and pervasive.

I recently believe I’ve found at least some evidence of this happening on this subreddit and I’d like our community to take a more active role in flagging this behavior when we see it.

To me possible astroturfing/disinformation is characterized by – quick responses (usually negative or critical) to very new posts – comments that seem to mirror each other but are posted seemingly independently. – Reddit activity that occurs like this late at night (ie comments being written almost immediately after a post goes live at an odd hour of the night – deletion of comments

I’m attaching a video and image of this very phenomena that just occurred a second ago on a post sharing the most recent merged podcast.

My goal of this post is to encourage our community to collectively look for, document, and call out this phenomena when it happens. Not every example we call out will be a genuine example of astroturfing but we MUST scrutinize this kind of activity more as disinformation has singlehandedly, more than any other factor, successfully impeded decades of disclosure efforts.

Let’s stop this problem together.