This does not count as my substantive post of the day, because 1) I do not feel this will be substantive, and 2) what the fuck
Anyway, I was scrolling away on YouTube shorts as I once again fail to kick shortform content, and I got recommended some guy named FLESH SIMULATOR. In the short, FLESH cited supposed proof that reddit is a psyop based on traffic data that they released that showed an impossible amount of traffic out of a particular airfoce base, which apparently reddit had to edit the blog to remove.
That got me interested, so I watched the full video, and was left confused. First and foremost, he makes a lot of claims, and does not cite any of them. He references a paper, for which he directly reads from, but does not cite in the description, sites an internet archive post of the original blog post, which he does not cite, and then goes on to present an awfully convincing conspiracy about how reddit is a psyop for the government, more specifically an experiment by the government to determine whether or not social media could be used as a psyop in 2014. I bring up this citation problem because I decided to do some digging, and I am going to cite my sources.
First, the paper. Its called Containment control for a social network with state-dependent connectivity. It is a real paper, that much is true. Pretty damning then, right? Well the problem is, he is being exceptionally misleading. I decided to check the internet archive post that he is talking about, and it says tghat the most addicted cities with 100k visits in total are 1) an airforce base, 2) oak brook, IL, and 3) South St. Paul, MN. To me, this suggests that these three cities collectively account for 100k of the traffic. Now that is still a lot, considering the population of the airforce base, however, not nearly as impossible as he seems to suggest. It gets more interesting, however. In the video, Mr. Flesh (IF THAT IS HIS REAL NAME), implies that reddit quickly deleted the mention of the airfoce base from their record because they "accidentally told the truth". But, I checked the archive, and at least from May 15th, 2014, over a year after the post was initially made, to June 27th, over 2 years later, the page was not editted. But see, I'm not done. I also checked up to June 29th, 2020, 5 years after the 2015 post, and it still wasn't editted. So over 7 years after the initial blog post, reddit never caught their little whoopsie? Technically, Mr. Flesh isn't lying, the redditblog.com site does indeed no longer allow you to view the blog post that features the reference to Eglin Air Force Base, FL. That's because the redditblog.com site no longer exists, and auto redirects you to redditinc.com, which has a blog section that removed the vast majority of the blog content that reddit had posted, which includes a lot more than just the airforce base posts, of which were up for, at minimum, 7 years past the initial point of posting. Sure, he did not explicitly state that the blog post was swiftly deleted, all he says is the blog post is long since deleted which he is "sure is for perfectly legitimate reasons of course". This is obviously sarcastic, even to an autistic person like me. This also fails to mention that it isn't *just* this blog post that is long since deleted, but pretty much every single blog post from before 2017. Moreover, it fails to mention that this blog post was not deleted, or altered, for 7 years after its posting. So, what about the airfoce base with lots of reddit traffic, did it publish the paper in question? Sure it did! There are some inaccuracies in the video that show kind of shitty journalistic standards, like stating that the Air Force Research Laboratory is headquatered within the Eglin base, when this is not true. It is in fact headquartered in the Wright-Patterson Air Force Base. Regardless, the paper was published through, in part, the Eglin aiforce base. Does this mean that the paper is proof that reddit is a psyop for the airforce??? No, what? Are you crazy? Let's actually look at what the paper says. In the video, Flesh directly questions where the airforce base got their data from for the study, and does not include the parts of the paper that go over methodology. Because of this, he misses a pretty huge flaw in his entire premise: this paper is not presenting the conclusions of an experiment done today, but rather presenting a mathematical model that might be used in the future to assess fractional-order system, and does so through a simulation taking in past data found through something referenced as the karate club network (Kan et al., 2014). Nowhere in the paper is any data analyzed, nor are there any results, because this is not an experiment, it is a write up for a model. I know very well that this is a write up for a model, because I wrote a write up for a model that I made with my cohorts when I was working for a research lab years back. This cannot be an anaysis of data from reddit as a psyop because this paper is not a study of data from a psyop. It is an introduction to a model that might be used in the future for research into how social media *could* be used as a psyop. Which the United States government was then famously caught doing in the Middle East and central Asia (VOA, 2022).
So, let's go over Flesh's bombshell evidence. Reddit had a lot of traffic from an airforce base in Florida in 2013, a fact that was posted in a blog post that was deleted close to 10 years later, along with most of the other blog posts on the site. From this airforce base, there is a section of a research institution within the airforce that published a paper that proposed a potential model that might be used to manipulate a given population using social media, using an event from 1977 as a means of simulating the model. And an important note: in 2022, the United States government WAS caught performing a psyop through Facebook and other Meta products in central Asia and the Middle East. So, what seems more likely: Reddit is a psyop perpetrated by an airforce base in Florida that published a seemingly unrelated paper that does not include any data or data analysis, does not seem to actually study anything, and doesn't even have a fucking results section, but instead just seems to propose a model, or this video is full of shit and Flesh happened to find that there was a lot of traffic out of an airforce base that also publishes research involving the internet? I can't speak for you, but I know my answer.
The Irony is in the comments of the video, there's a guy in all-caps declaring that we should always be skeptical and "DO [YOUR] OWN RESEARCH", when they clearly were not skeptical of this video, nor did they do their own research. Another comment also says that "you are not immune to propaganda." This is true, dear YouTube commenter, but you are also not immune, as demonstrated here.
References (PLEASE FOR THE LOVE OF GOD, JUST FUCKING CITE THEM):
Voa (2022). Meta Report: US Military Behind Online Influence Campaign Targeting Central Asia, Middle East. https://www.voanews.com/a/meta-report-us-military-behind-online-influence-campaign-targeting-central-asia-middle-east/6848112.html
Kan, Z., Klotz, R., J., Pasiliao, E., L., & Dixon, E., W. (2015). Containment control for a social network with state-dependent connectivity. Automatica, 56, 86-92. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.automatica.2015.03.026.
FLESH SIMULATOR (2024). Reddit is a Psy-Op | FLESH SIMULATOR. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V7GtYaruTys
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