Posted on 10/17/2018 8:56:30 PM PDT by yesthatjallen
Reddit CEO Steve Huffman on Wednesday detailed the "war room" the company has created to fend off foreign misinformation campaigns on the fifth most-visited U.S. site, saying the collaborative effort has helped the company address the issue.
Huffman told NBC News that the company has multiple teams dedicated to addressing the spread of misinformation and protecting the site from manipulative behavior.
The look inside the "war room" comes just a few weeks ahead of the midterm elections, which experts have warned are a target for foreign entities attempting to influence American voters.
"They’re not simple issues," Huffman told NBC. "The behaviors are complex, so it takes a variety of expertise to sort them all out."
He added that while there is ongoing foreign activity, the process of rooting out misinformation has become easier as the platform has expanded its resources.
"We've become more sophisticated,” Huffman said. "Our tools for dealing with them have increased as well."
Reddit, Facebook, Twitter and other platforms have taken steps in the aftermath of the 2016 election to protect their sites from foreign influence campaigns.
Reddit earlier this year removed "a few hundred accounts" linked to Russian propaganda. Huffman said at the time that the site hadn't seen many ads from Russia "either before or after the 2016 election" and that ads from Russia are currently banned from the site.
A short time later, Huffman announced that Reddit had found nearly 1,000 accounts suspected to be linked to a Russian troll farm. Few of those accounts "had a visible impact on the site," Huffman said.
No wonder they deleted the Trump sub Reddit.
We should all be thankful Reddit is protecting us from 'misinformation'.
I think they still have The_Donald.
I’ll go look...
Why don’t they just shut the entire site down to protect us from them conveying any sort of misinformation.?
I joined during campaign and was something like number twenty thousand...up to six hundred thousand now. I check in now and again.
How is anything traced to the Rooskies?
They got rid of the “Calm Before the Storm” and “Great Awakening” subreddits, which were there to study #QAnon.
I just checked and I see there was only a discussion of whether the subreddit should be deleted because it was allegedly infiltrated by Russian trolls:
https://www.theverge.com/2018/9/24/17896586/reddit-the-donald-russia-troll-farm-ira-influence-operation
My mistake.
All of these companies falling in line with the “Evil Russians!” fraud in order to give it cover are so blatantly obvious it’s ridiculous.
I also never heard of a liberal disliking Russia before the 2016 election.
Reddit is looking for any excuse to shut down The Donald. don’t let it happen.
Anything that is not a Soros-approved narrative is “Russian Propoganda”, did you not realize that?
meh
The funniest was when they blamed the failure of the crappy new Star Wars movie on Russian trolls...
Maybe that explains the “Star Wars Holiday Special” - for anyone who hasn’t seen it, look at online reviews for this movie. Don’t watch it - its horrible - but get the condensed version in a review.
I was so excited when that star wars special came on and then as I watched it, I was really let down!
1) Declare anyone with opinions you don’t like a “russian bot”
2) Declare a war to fight “Russian misinformation”
3) remove any opinion you don’t like
4) become a liberal-only platform
5) be shocked at the election outcome with Rs winning since “nobody on the platform supports Rs”
IIRC, Advance Publications is Reddit’s largest shareholder.
If so, nuff said.
The_Donald is too filled with youngsters, but I like their moxie.
They take the fight to the enemy, and this new NPC meme is awesome; leftists are already protesting against it and CNN is calling it a hate crime!
I vaguely remembered it (wasn’t even 10 years old yet); watching the reviews, I was glad I didn’t remember. So stupid...one of the reviews describes Carrie Fisher saying she used it to encourage guests overstaying their welcomes at parties to leave, and another has a quote from George Lucas that he would destroy every copy if he could.
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