[mrweasel]

Are you suggesting that people have bots answering question on place like AskReddit in an effort to nudge society in a certain direction? That would explain why much of Reddit, Instagram and Facebook is so completely unhinged, but that is just a wild way of influencing the world, and to what end?

[coldtea]

Likely the classics: voting a certain way, supporting a certain state, supporting a certain cause, and buying things.

[cedws]

Yes, this isn't even a conspiracy theory. Reddit is one of the most astroturfed of them all, besides maybe Facebook. At least Facebook has consistent moderation they're (somewhat) accountable for. Moderation on Reddit is extremely shady and opaque, the subreddits aren't ran democratically so they can shut up whoever they want selectively to foster a particular sentiment.

[jerf]

This is another one of those "is your 'conspiracy theory' filter miscalibrated?" questions. It doesn't take much research at all to find many concrete, documented instances of this, organizations that do it, organizations that you can find that you can pay to do it, people posting their accounts of having worked at one of these companies, pictures of their setups, all kinds of things. If your filter is going "no, of course nobody does that, that's just a conspiracy theory", you need to recalibrate it because it is way off. Yes, people do it, at scale, and there's little reason to believe the stuff you can uncover in 5 minutes of searching is all of it either when there's every motivation for a lot of it to stay hidden. It's not a theory, it's an entire industry.

[philipwhiuk]

> and to what end?

Anarchism / destabilisation.

[mrweasel]

Well, they're doing an excellent job then.