Bot Farm / Troll Farm

A bot farm, or troll farm, is an organised network of fake or automated accounts operated to manipulate public opinion at scale, whether by amplifying messages, simulating grassroots support, harassing targets or seeding disinformation. The accounts may be fully automated, human-operated, or a mix, and the operation's power comes from coordinating many of them to drown out or distort genuine discussion.

The archetypal example is Russia's Internet Research Agency, a Saint Petersburg operation that the United States intelligence community described as a troll farm and that used Reddit as one venue in its influence activity, including a notorious instance in which it ran a question-and-answer session largely staffed by its own sockpuppet accounts. Reddit later removed hundreds of accounts tied to the operation. Bot and troll farms matter to the platform because they directly attack the authenticity that vote-ranked discussion depends on, and combating them is a core motivation behind Reddit's rules against manipulation, its account-detection systems, and its more recent moves toward human verification.