Here's a section on Reddit, but read the whole thing. The rest is fascinating too.
“You can use proxy accounts to ‘upvote’ articles you want to promote; or to ‘downvote’ articles you want to kill,” he said.
“Reddit expects people to try and game the system, so has many defences in place,” he added.
Still, Thinkst managed to breach those defences easily. It registered 50 proxy accounts and found that this was sufficient to upvote or downvote articles in subreddits – the various, more specialised sections on the platform.
Articles that are downvoted enough times are removed from the page for Reddit admins to investigate – but that act in itself is a victory, because, as noted, the article is knocked off the page.
“You can also try ‘trickle downvoting’ – only downvote as many times as new articles have upvotes. It keeps the score even, and while you do this, upvote the article you want people to see,” Azhar said.
When Thinkst did some mass downvoting on the WorldNews subreddit, downvoting all new articles as they appeared, the admins suspected something was up, but all they did was to put up a notice telling their users not to panic.
When Thinkst tried the same type of manipulation on the more specialised NetSec subreddit – devoted to news and matters about cyber-security – “the moderators responded with intelligent discussions and roped in official reddit admins to talk about the problem."
“But even then, they didn’t seem to have a handle of what was really going on. We had 50 bots operating, but they estimated only 20,” said Azhar.
“This shouldn’t have been so hard to spot at all,” added Haroon. “You have a bunch of users all voting on the same article, and you can isolate and detect things like voting in synch; signup times that are similar; common email domains; patterns in usernames; IP (Internet Protocol) addresses from known open proxies; and more, including users with low karma scores.”
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flyawayhigh ago
Here's a section on Reddit, but read the whole thing. The rest is fascinating too.
“You can use proxy accounts to ‘upvote’ articles you want to promote; or to ‘downvote’ articles you want to kill,” he said.
“Reddit expects people to try and game the system, so has many defences in place,” he added.
Still, Thinkst managed to breach those defences easily. It registered 50 proxy accounts and found that this was sufficient to upvote or downvote articles in subreddits – the various, more specialised sections on the platform.
Articles that are downvoted enough times are removed from the page for Reddit admins to investigate – but that act in itself is a victory, because, as noted, the article is knocked off the page.
“You can also try ‘trickle downvoting’ – only downvote as many times as new articles have upvotes. It keeps the score even, and while you do this, upvote the article you want people to see,” Azhar said.
When Thinkst did some mass downvoting on the WorldNews subreddit, downvoting all new articles as they appeared, the admins suspected something was up, but all they did was to put up a notice telling their users not to panic.
When Thinkst tried the same type of manipulation on the more specialised NetSec subreddit – devoted to news and matters about cyber-security – “the moderators responded with intelligent discussions and roped in official reddit admins to talk about the problem."
“But even then, they didn’t seem to have a handle of what was really going on. We had 50 bots operating, but they estimated only 20,” said Azhar.
“This shouldn’t have been so hard to spot at all,” added Haroon. “You have a bunch of users all voting on the same article, and you can isolate and detect things like voting in synch; signup times that are similar; common email domains; patterns in usernames; IP (Internet Protocol) addresses from known open proxies; and more, including users with low karma scores.”
‘Karma’ is how Reddit users are rated for their contributions to and engagement with the community. - See more at: http://www.digitalnewsasia.com/digital-economy/censorship-shadowy-forces-controlling-online-conversations?page=0%2C1#sthash.nXXrDRf3.dpuf
There was nothing on Wikipedia. They should check that out too.
721r ago
Don't miss presentation slides (pdf, 55mb), some interesting details there.
PDFy mirror