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

date linked: 28 April 2025

source: link to article, 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.

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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…

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