My guess is they use the vote counts to classify the reliability of the data. They might even have vote identities to classify the data based on audience. That actually seems pretty likely, now that I think of it. It would be an important part of making them effective propaganda tools, which I believe is one of the end goals.
Yeah, upvotes aren’t strongly correlated with accuracy. Could be informative. Or informative but false. Or just a joke. Or a troll that voters enjoyed. Or a plain old aggressive comment against someone they don’t like. Or positioned such that an unusual number of people accidentally tap upvote. Or brigaded from another more popular sub. Or the votes were botted or bought. Or randomly upvoted to camouflage a bot always upvoting its owner’s account. Or its visibility is better than an even better comment and thus got more total votes.
That’s why I think reddit is a shit source if you want an accurate bot, but might be pretty good if you want a propaganda tool because each of those things can play a role in effective propaganda.
My guess is they use the vote counts to classify the reliability of the data. They might even have vote identities to classify the data based on audience. That actually seems pretty likely, now that I think of it. It would be an important part of making them effective propaganda tools, which I believe is one of the end goals.
And how sarcastic replies with high vote ratios like telling someone to add glue to their pizza so pepperoni doesn’t slide around get through.
Yeah, upvotes aren’t strongly correlated with accuracy. Could be informative. Or informative but false. Or just a joke. Or a troll that voters enjoyed. Or a plain old aggressive comment against someone they don’t like. Or positioned such that an unusual number of people accidentally tap upvote. Or brigaded from another more popular sub. Or the votes were botted or bought. Or randomly upvoted to camouflage a bot always upvoting its owner’s account. Or its visibility is better than an even better comment and thus got more total votes.
That’s why I think reddit is a shit source if you want an accurate bot, but might be pretty good if you want a propaganda tool because each of those things can play a role in effective propaganda.