Dealing with fake profiles and stolen content on Reddit How ENMLounge is approaching this growing problem
Stop wasting time with people who end up being fake .
Anyone who has tried to use any of these subreddits for any amount of time to actually meet up with other fun, like-minded people has likely run into the problem of fake profiles. It's a growing problem on Reddit (especially now with the proliferation of AI and exploding popularity of OnlyFans) and one they don't seem incentivized enough to handle.
Or, like tumblr was with it's "porn problem", they're dependent on the metrics created by these fake accounts to keep investors happily injecting cash into the company.
- Fake Profiles and Stolen Content
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One of the ways we're getting around some of the more lazy attempts to mask fake accounts that are using media from other, real, accounts is by implementing machine learning and image similarity algorithms to identify when a profile is using media (exact or just very similar) that has been used by other accounts.
Reverse image search (with variable similarity) is coming to ENMLounge users with a paid subscription soon!
A very common approach we see is that a person will download and re-use the content from well-known creators on the platform but then crop or otherwise alter the image to try and avoid duplicate detection. We're able to identify these cases and flag the media objects themselves as spam, but "whitelist" the original creator's account so that they're not flagged but any future Reddit accounts that try to use the same media will be flagged as spam.
Another problematic user-type is the person who is using someone else's media to create fake listings over and over and over again. We'll see the same 5 images used across dozens of accounts with very similarly themed names (many times using actual nouns/names) and very similar post content/post locations. Most of these cases seem to be someone trying to live out their fantasy about a specific person (potentially their girlfriend, ex-girlfriend, wife, ex-wife or just someone they know or are otherwise obsessed with). The accounts always end up getting disabled by Reddit - but not for weeks/months in many cases. We're able to identify these cases and flag the media objects as spam and take care of the problem of seeing these people in your feed from time to time. There are specifically a handful of these that keep coming back to r/swingersr4r and r/hotwiferequests that end up getting lots of upvotes and comment activity before they're eventually banned.
For more numbers, view our Report on Reddit Spam Activity
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Example screenshot of the image details we provide on a single image that has been identified to have 16 duplicate or near-duplicate copies posted by 91 unique users! (The other Reddit accounts that have posted this image are shown outside of the screenshot)
1,018,384 media objects have been flagged as spam