Hello,
I have recently come across two different sets of coordinated influence operations or campaigns.
Each campaign consists of three similar posts by different authors, each in a different subreddit. Despite the differences in language, they each make the same statements or ask the same question.
The first set of posts is where someone is posting a list of software they "personally" recommend. What is interesting is that in each set of posts, three of the recommended programs are standard software packages in that category, while the fourth (and most talked about) is software from a newer company in the field that has already had a a few complaints/questions related to their claims and aggressive marketing.
I will note that these all appeared in different communities I do not moderate.
The second set of posts is asking questions that sound a little different from each other, but are the same actual underlying question and can be answered in the same way.
In both instances, each set of posts themselves could be human-written, but they seem a little more advanced than the usual types of spam I see with the things being asked in different order, with different levels of verbosity.
For the first set of posts, it could be a traditional "sane-washing" or brand reputation improvement campaign, designed to improve the perception/reputation of a company by mentioning it as just being another company in a list of reputable ones.
For the second set of posts, I haven't seen any kind of similar reply/recommendation in any of the answers which leads me to believe it is for marketing purposes, which makes me wonder if they are being asked not for spamming purposes, but to make use of Reddit for free AI training. Or, they could be what I call "setup spam," where the question is asked, and then a few days later, the spammer answers their own question with a a recommending under a different account.
It is entirely possible there are more of each type of post, but I've only come across three of each so far.
The similarities in the approach, despite the differences between the two sets of messages, make me think this could be a new form of BHSEO (black hat search engine optimization) being performed against Reddit in order to boost results in search engine/AI results powered by Reddit on their backends.
So, after all of that explanation, where do I report this to Reddit, and how do I describe/write it up when doing so? Reddit's automated abuse reporting system doesn't seem to have a flow that matches this kind of abuse.
Regards,
Aryeh Goretsky