企業が Reddit を活用して ChatGPT や Google AI Search の回答を操作している

imageThe moderators of the biohacking subreddit say that peptide and hormone replacement therapy companies have been surreptitiously spamming Reddit in an attempt to get their posts scraped by AI chatbots. The strategy is an effort to systematically manipulate the answers provided by chatbots by manipulating the underlying source material that those chatbots will scrape—in this case, a popular Reddit community.

In a post last week, the moderators of r/biohackers said they would be banning new posts about peptides and hormone replacement therapy (HRT) because of attempted manipulation by the companies that make, market, and sell them. r/Biohackers is a long-running subreddit about using supplements, experimental pharmacology, and other longevity or fitness-adjacent themes; peptides and HRT have become a wildly popular topic of discussion on the subreddit, especially as companies try to market them off-label or as grey-market compounds.

“As AI search engines increasingly pull answers from Reddit, companies are using us for AEO. On top of that, there's been an explosion of peptide interest and AI usage flooding the sub. Together, this has put serious pressure on content quality,” a post by the moderators read.

AEO is AI-engine optimization, and it is an evolution of search engine optimization where brands and marketing companies attempt to create content that they hope will be scraped by large language models. Manipulating Reddit with bots, sock puppet accounts, and human accounts that are paid to promote brands has become a core strategy of firms that do AEO, because Reddit has become one of most-often cited sources by popular AI tools like ChatGPT and Google’s AI search. For example, a company called RedRover offers AEO and SEO for companies; on its home page, it says “rank #1 on Search and get cited by AI: AI agents that mass publish content to help you rank on Google, ChatGPT, and Reddit—driving traffic to your site from every corner of the internet.”

“An army of agents publishing blog content & reddit posts that solves both SEO & AEO at scale,” RedRover advertises.

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Do you know anything else about AEO or Reddit manipulation? I would love to hear from you. Using a non-work device, you can message me securely on Signal at jason.404. Otherwise, send me an email at jason@404media.co.

Peptides cover a spectrum of injectable amino acids, from GLP-1 to a series of compounded and grey-market substances that can be used for muscle growth and recovery, hair growth, skincare and anti-aging, and a host of other uses; HRT is also used for many reasons, including by trans people as gender-affirming care, but also by women going through perimenopause or menopause, and by people in the life extension and biohacking communities. Both of these industries have exploded in recent years. The industry is made up of a mix of companies trying to operate in a legitimate way and sketchier companies whose products may be unsafe. Basically, it’s something of a health Wild West.

“We see the rise of things like peptides, compounds that are becoming mainstream that don't have much regulation, and we see so much potential and like opportunity for innovation for clinically validating them,” one of the moderators of the biohackers subreddit told me on a call. “But we’re also seeing this alongside incredibly risky sourcing, teens posting about wanting to grow an extra few inches. And then we’re seeing AI manipulation from vendors trying to promote these peptides and get kids to source from them.”

“These two things together have become untenable for us, and after trying so many different strategies to use Reddit’s tools to prevent this from being a problem, we just made this call,” to limit posts about peptides and HRT to weekly “megathreads,” they added. “I just feel like, the dead internet, there’s this sadness I feel of this one place on the internet that was so human is sort of eroding and becoming bogged up with artificial AI-driven content. I think that’s super depressing.”

imageScreenshot from RedRover's websiteimageScreenshot from RedRover's websiteGiven the health and self-experimentation nature of the subreddit, the moderator said that they were worried that a sketchy company will promote their product, and someone will use it and get hurt.

“There's an element of brands using Reddit to manipulate consumers and get people to buy their products and sort of the ethics of marketing and how the attention economy is sort of evolving under AI. That’s it’s own problem,” the moderator said. “But then for us specifically, it’s like how do we prevent actual physical harm?”

It has become incredibly difficult to stop Reddit manipulation, because the firms doing it are getting more sophisticated. The moderator said that there are really standard and long-running strategies where brands will hop in the comments and suggest their products: “That type of marketing has always existed and if people want to try something new because the brand resonated with them, cool. That’s the way marketing should flow in my mind,” they said.

“But what I’m seeing that is way scarier to me is that there are companies that will reverse-engineer the actual prompt patterns that are prioritized by LLMs, and so you’ll see someone post a super clickbait, high-traction, vague question like ‘Is all the hype around Vitamin D actually worth it?” they added. “And that thread will do really well because everyone on biohackers actually has an opinion, so it gets engagement and prioritized by LLMs, and then brands will sneak in and they’ll embed their brand mentions in those threads in the exact right places in a seemingly organic way. But none of it is organic, the entire thing is a strategy by an agency to prioritize brand mentions or a narrative within an LLM.”

The Reddit accounts that are doing this are “warmed up” or are made to seem human, meaning they have a posting history that is not just promotional. This makes them much harder to detect and moderate against. Some of the agencies doing this are paying real people to post promotional content, or have built communities where people are incentivized to post promotional content. The moderator said that Reddit’s automated moderation tools have been helpful, but that the type of promotion happening has become so sophisticated that it has become more of a you-know-it-if-you-see it kind of thing.

“A lot of it has become pattern recognition,” they said. “You literally just sort of know what to look for. But the problem is you don’t want to become punitive to the people who aren’t doing this maliciously, and so I think the over-moderation risk is very real.”

A Reddit spokesperson told 404 Media that it is always working on new tools to help moderators catch manipulation: “Our internal Safety teams leverage human review and sophisticated automated tooling to detect and remove this content at massive scale, and we have over two decades of experience in doing so,” the spokesperson said. “On top of this, we also provide moderators with automated tooling that can detect and suspend users likely to be spammers.”