‘The Worst Internet-Research Ethics Violation I Have Ever Seen’ | The most persuasive “people” on a popular subreddit turned out to be a front for a secret AI experiment.

But the lesson you're taking from it is that they are still not worth it, rather than maybe it's important to listen to people you don't agree with on everything, because people are complex?

So, we're gonna tackle bot manipulation for research purposes at the same time we're gonna deal with bot manipulation for ads and political manipulation, right? Or is it just not okay to do for scientific ends but fine if it's to sell you shit or advance a political agenda?

To be clear, this is very much not okay, it's just weird to me that once the goal is to sell you shit people are much more accepting of it as business as usual.

Meanwhile, Reddit’s chief legal officer, Ben Lee, wrote that the company intends to “ensure that the researchers are held accountable for their misdeeds.”

"How dare they perform such dangerous and unethical experiments on our users without paying us an appropriate access fee?" He probably went on to say.

...and the researchers considered thier experiment a success because they didn't see any comments calling thier bots, bots......it shouldn't matter that calling someone a bot is a bannable offense there...

At Facebook, that sort of thing would just be called an ordinary workday.

If only everyone who tried to warn about this sort of shit happening wasn't an alt-right troll, maybe something could have been done!