The Most Persuasive ‘People’ on Reddit Were a Front for AI

When Reddit rebranded itself as “the heart of the internet” a couple of years ago, the slogan was meant to evoke the site’s organic character. In an age of social media dominated by algorithms, Reddit took pride in being curated by a community that expressed its feelings in the form of upvotes and downvotes—in other words, being shaped by actual people.

So earlier this week, when members of a popular subreddit learned that their community had been infiltrated by undercover researchers…