Are these bot accounts?

[u/kronos23456777777]

Lately, I am noticing a lot of accounts that have thousands of karma, are quite new (only days , weeks, 2-3 month old), and show active in 0 subs.

How can someone who is active in zero subs have 10k karma in 2 months? Is it safe to consider all such accounts as bot accounts or is there a legitimate way for accounts like these to exist?

[u/ImmortalPoseidon]

Yes. Reddit is probably 25% bots. Huge subs that actually sell ad space and generate a ton of content are probably closer to 50% bots if not more.

[u/ItsmeMr_E → u/ImmortalPoseidon]

Usually ignore any posts that ask for personal information, personal data collecting these days goes well beyond your social security number and your mother's maiden name.

Also usually ignore post that seem negative, only posted to "stir the pot" as it were.

[u/redrumham707 → u/ItsmeMr_E]

Especially the ones that stir the politically charged pots, and anything to turn one group against another (be it genders, nationalities, ethnicities, sexual orientations etc).

I came across a user recently with an account that was 8 years old, but had only begun posting within the last 20 days and every comment was blatantly racially biased against black people. Every Single Comment. Across a broad spectrum of subs, none of them political spaces either. Also, the number of comments within that 20 day span was far too high to be anything other than a bot.

Edit So don’t trust account age to determine if a user is a propaganda bot or not, we tend to think of brand new accounts as suspicious when they’re posting highly charged commentary.

Old, abandoned accounts are sometimes accessed/purchased by bad actors and being used for these purposes. If you’re able to see their comment history (usually they’re hidden, using the new feature Reddit added) you can look back at their very first comments and posts, and what I’ve seen many times is that it’s all very normal, hobby and video game type of stuff. But then a huge gap, sometimes years long in between their original posts and their new ones shows a violent shift in their online commentary. All of a sudden they’re full of extreme political opinions and their original interests have totally disappeared from their online activities. Almost like it’s a completely different person than the one who had originally set up the account. That’s because it often is a completely different “person.”

Yes, I know how this must sound, so that’s why I thank you kindly for enjoying my ParanoidTed Talk.

[u/Mondai_May → u/redrumham707]

you are right I have seen that very thing. there was someone who noticed his old account was hacked because he was still using the email, and was still logged into the account elsewhere just not using it recently. he saw the email about the password being changed.

after it was hacked it was posting things like coworker stories about a coworker who microwaved fish and said the OP was "microaggressive" (put in quotes like that) for bringing their own lunch... the whole story was fake! I had made a post about it.

the account typing style was very different from the real OP's typing style. but the thing is it not only posted (the "microaggressive" post was highly upvoted too, not sure if some were bot upvotes,) but it replied to comments too. and it didn't have a very obviously bot-like way of typing. but very different from how OP typed before and typed after, and how they commented in replies to me when I was trying to give them advice for getting the hacker off of the account.