The other 85% is non-corporate trolls trying to manipulate public opinion

I don’t think we know what the actual figure is because this blog post ostensibly fabricates this alleged 2020 study.

Edit: But of course this post is taking off anyway because Lemmy users are soooo much more discerning than those dumbass Reddit users.

15% of reddit is probably political, the other 85% are niche subreddits.

Fuck the rest of the admins too while we’re at it.

Unless you’re a jailbait, then maybe don’t fuck Spez.

Guy from Langley spending 80 hours a week posting hundreds of SpongeBob memes to convince the Wendy’s PR company flak that we need to invade Greenland for national security reasons.

Corporate & Trolls Estimates:

A 2020 study (re-circulated in late 2025) found that in the top 100 subreddits—the primary sources for r/all—at least 15% of communities contained content likely posted by corporate trolls or bots designed to promote specific organizations.

Bot and Spam Removals:

Reddit’s Transparency Reports consistently show that “content manipulation” and “spam” (which include paid promotional agendas) account for the vast majority of admin-level removals. For instance, in early 2024, nearly 70% of admin removals were attributed to spam.

Prevalence of Bots:

Independent estimates and user analysis suggest that 5% to 20% of users in high-visibility subreddits may be bots. These bots are frequently used by bad actors to manufacture “consensus” or “outrage” to push specific agendas.

Infiltration Experiments:

Unauthorized research in 2025 demonstrated that AI bots can successfully pose as humans and engage in “psychological manipulation” to change user views in front-page subreddits like r/changemyview without being detected.

Yeah the article is pretty trash.

15% of the top subs contain corporate propaganda becomes “15% of the subs are compromised”, “compromised” means something more than “contains propaganda” to me.

We need more people with your kind of diligence.

I’m glad I’m not the only one - the article is disinformation, “fake news” in the purest sense.

Yeah, the number is bullshit. I left before AI was truly reasonable and it was flush with corporate fanboys and vote manipulation, paid or not. Also it certainly wasn’t 15% of the subscribers, depending on the sub it might have been more or less of the active participants. Popular subs about products, hobbies, or software seemed to have a LOT of this product is just really great where for the most part noone is going to push their affinity for one corporate product over another.

I actually care about the quality of statistical claims and data science

Then you’ve gotta be having a really bad time trying to analyze subjective data about posts in internet forums with basically zero positive identification of the authors.

Even if the study authors bothered to “drill down” and check the posting history of each and every message author in a studied forum, that can be (and undoubtably frequently is) faked with boilerplate AI spam type generic responses all over a bunch of generic forums just to manufacture “validity” for the intended “high value” posts in the target areas.

If this sounds far-fetched, remember that over 20 years ago there were “gold farmers” playing WoW in China for the sole purpose of “earning” in-game value through repetitive play. Literally thousands of WoW accounts were banned just months after the game launched due to obvious farming activity.

All kinds of organizations pay for all kinds of advertising to “shape public opinion” on all kinds of topics. Only a small fraction of that advertising money gets dumped into traditional high profile channels like 30 second Superbowl spots.

You realize that Lemmy is also botted right?

This blog post was plausibly written by AI. Look at the fabricated source on the 2020 study and at the wording.

Definitely a worry, training young minds on BS.

Maybe the rest is porn.

Well the article said that the study is from 2020. So it might be a lot worse now.

It says AT LEAST 15%

Honestly, the only way I see is by staying under the radar. Right now Lemmy feels like early-days Reddit - most people haven’t heard of it, and the content is skewed heavily towards privacy-focused tech nerds. As soon as it becomes mainstream and everyone has a Lemmy account, that’s when the corporate trolling and bots arrive.

The one good thing about Lemmy is its distributed nature. Like we used to have private or invite-only forums back in the day, perhaps some servers could implement this kind of approach and only federate carefully with other servers. Would require a lot of coordination. But there’s definitely more hope here than on a commercial and centralised platform!

We’re already offered some protection by up/down votes not mattering. Botting yourself doesn’t buy you much visibility. The real concern for me would be Mods or channel owners on the take. Just like they can’t buy themself views, we rely on mods to bury bullshit and not bury non-advertiser-friendly content. Of course, if a channel goes rogue, we just abandon it on that node and move to another. The pure nature of federation makes us less attractive to advertisers, They’re not going to want to chase dozens of smaller channels all over the place for eyeballs. Also, we’re nearly too small to care about while there are targets as big as Bluesky and Reddit around.

Lots of accounts probing the system for weakness, to be sure. But there’s just not much of an audience to manipulate. And you’ll virtually never find a Lemmy thread indexed in Google results with the high profile of a comparable Reddit thread.

Not on Lemmy - Instance admins usually either do that job or try to get people doing it out of there. And the userbase isn’t that large.