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Reddit Bots Improve Moderation, Encourage Cooperation, and Spread Emotions
by Ethnology TechnologyDecember 19th, 2024
Too Long; Didn't Read
Reddit bots aid moderation and spark collaboration, as seen with Automod's adaptability to community rules. Users engage with entertainment bots, often mimicking their sentiment and language. Reddit’s structure limits misinformation and polarization, enabling bots to enhance cooperation and emotional contagion.
This is Part 7 of a 12-part series based on the research paper “Human-Machine Social Systems.” Use the table of links below to navigate to the next part.
Table of Links
Box 1: Competition in high-frequency trading markets
Box 3: Cooperation and coordination on Wikipedia
Box 4: Cooperation and contagion on Reddit
Conclusion, Acknowledgments, References, and Competing interests
Box 4: Cooperation and Contagion on Reddit
Reddit is a popular news aggregation, content rating, and discussion website founded in 2005. Bots on Reddit provide internal moderation and communication, augment functionality (e.g., for mobile users), or post content, ranging from comic and playful posts by evident automated accounts such as haiku robot and ObamaRobot, to trolling and provocative comments by undercover social bots[214].
Similarly to Wikipedia, Reddit has developed norms and protocols for deploying bots [215], but similarly to Twitter, it has no effective service limitations to prevent covert and malicious automated accounts. Nevertheless, Reddit differs from Twitter in several crucial ways – content on the site is posted within communities, heavily moderated, up-/downvoted, and extensively discussed. Due to these structural differences, political misinformation, polarization, and conflict are less pronounced on the platform.
Reddit offers evidence for collaboration and contagion between humans and bots. Content moderators have widely adopted Automod – a bot that is flexible to updates, adaptable to community rules, and interpretable. The bot aids with menial tasks but does not necessarily decrease workloads as it requires continuous updates in response to changes in user behavior and language and involves high volumes of correspondence with incorrectly banned users [216].
On the other side, regular users engage with evident entertainment bots, and their direct replies imitate the sentiment and the words of the bot posts [217]. Thus, emotional contagion and lexical entrainment can occur between humans and bots, even when humans are aware of the simple automated script behind the bot.
Authors:
(1) Milena Tsvetkova, Department of Methodology, London School of Economics and Political Science, London, United Kingdom;
(2) Taha Yasseri, School of Sociology, University College Dublin, Dublin, Ireland and Geary Institute for Public Policy, University College Dublin, Dublin, Ireland;
(3) Niccolo Pescetelli, Collective Intelligence Lab, New Jersey Institute of Technology, Newark, New Jersey, USA;
(4) Tobias Werner, Center for Humans and Machines, Max Planck Institute for Human Development, Berlin, Germany.
This paper is available on arxiv under CC BY 4.0 DEED license.
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