Manipulating Visibility of Political and Apolitical Threads on Reddit via Score Boosting

摘要

While the phrase 'Fake News' has only recently entered the contemporary vernacular, the problem of other fake content such as reviews or opinion articles is and has been pervasive for many years. False articles and reviews have been used to influence purchasers of goods and services in online commercial and review sites, who have responded by removing such articles and reviews. In response, some promoters employ an alternative promotion method where genuine articles and product reviews are exploited using reader voting mechanisms to promote or suppress the visibility of those articles and reviews. This paper measures the effect of vote manipulation on article visibility and user engagement by comparing sets of threads on Reddit whose visibility is artificially increased. The manipulated threads are compared to sets of control threads. The thread sets were selected from two high-activity subreddits: the apolitical AskReddit and the highly-political The_Donald. The results show that vote manipulation has a significant impact on the visibility of the threads on both subreddits. Clearly, remedial action to detect and deny vote manipulation is needed by sites that allow voting by users.