Researchers Secretly Ran a Massive, Unauthorized AI Persuasion Experiment on Reddit Users

Date Linked: 28 April 2025

Source: story link, from 404media.co

I’ve been waiting for 404 (or someone else) to report on this so that I could rage post it (and assign it in future classes). What a terrible breach of research ethics.

Similar Posts:

đź”— linkblog: The Gleeful Cruelty of the White House X Account

đź”— linkblog: The Far Right Has a New Hero: Elon Musk'

đź”— linkblog: Can anyone stop President Musk?'

Tonight’s ethics lecture for my internet research class this semester will include a brief discussion of protecting researchers, so I got to go through my collection of screenshots of when a reactionary Mormon group took issue with our studying their posts.

Putting together a reading list for a class on social media research reminds me how much writing on this serves as an unintentional history. I don’t know if any of this chapter on FB and Twitter APIs is still relevant, but that alone may be worth reading it for…

Comments:

You can click on the < button in the top-right of your browser window to read and write comments on this post with Hypothesis. You can read more about how I use this software here.