The goal is to make the person behind the accounts seem more realistic, and more human-thus making it easier to seed the more contentious content. Like Bootinbull and JerryRansom, they start with innocuous posts about dogs and animals before pivoting to geopolitics. Instead, Russian trolls build up fake personas online, trying to ingratiate themselves into preexisting Reddit communities, and then move the conversation on to their true aims. Reddit continue to track spam bots and trolls, processing 7.9 million reports of “content manipulation” in the second quarter of 2021. The academics identified the accounts as questionable after tracking the behaviors of 335 users identified by Reddit as trolls back in 2017. The account is one of 1,248 identified by researchers from a consortium of British, American, and European universities as Russian-sponsored trolls, operating on the world wide web. They were a Russian troll account, likely paid by the state to try and upend conventional online discourse and push the country’s talking points to the masses. But Bootinbull wasn’t real-at least not in our traditional understanding. Two weeks later, they were submitting a picture of a dog reclining in a deckchair to r/aww, while also taking part in discussions on the site about the challenge Europe faced with an influx of refugees and Turkey’s geopolitical maneuvering.īootinbull continued adding to Reddit, alternately posting cute pictures of dogs alongside debating China and Russia’s future role in the world. Still, Bootinbull kept going, posting on r/4chan, r/gaming, and r/cats. The post received a grand total of zero comments. While the question may have been burned into Bootinbull’s mind, it wasn’t something that bothered others on Reddit. At 2.45 am they headed to the r/gaming subreddit and posed a question to the community: Was the Xenosaga series of games influenced by Dan Simmons’ Hyperion cantos? Reddit user Bootinbull signed up for their account on October 14, 2015.
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