On the Internet no-one knows you’re not a bot: ‘Botting’ on Reddit as participatory culture

Summary

Graham and Carlon use the curious case of Reddit’s “Anus_Fungi” accounts — which spammed mushroom emojis across the platform in 2020–2021 — to challenge the binary between human and bot-generated content. Through a mixed-methods study of 9,728 Reddit comments and a thematic analysis of the counter-subreddit r/stopanusfungi, they show that this apparent “bot invasion” was largely a human-driven imitative phenomenon embedded in Reddit’s participatory culture. The paper reframes “botting” as a spectrum of repetitive posting practices — manual, semi-automated, and automated — and argues that authenticity online is a culturally negotiated performance rather than a technical property of authorship.

Key Contributions

• Extends Schäfer’s concept of “botting” beyond automated visibility strategies to encompass manual, playful, community-driven repetition.
• Delivers one of the first platform-specific studies of botting on Reddit, contrasting it with the monetisation- and fame-driven dynamics observed on Instagram, Twitter/X, and YouTube.
• Treats classification ambiguity (is it a bot or a human?) as itself an empirical finding rather than a methodological problem to be solved.
• Argues for a shift away from technical provenance detection toward community-based, context-sensitive moderation.
• Contributes to theoretical debates on digital authenticity, counterpublics, and platform vernaculars by showing authenticity as performed rather than inherent.

Methods

A mixed-methods case study (Jan 2020–March 2023) combining computational and interpretive techniques. Comments containing a single mushroom emoji were collected from Pushshift via Google BigQuery and validated against the Reddit API. 155 “fungi” accounts were identified using naming conventions, posting patterns, cross-references with r/BotDefense and r/BotTerminator ban lists (adding ~62 more), and manual review. Descriptive and temporal analyses were run in Python; cross-subreddit activity was mapped via NetworkX and Gephi modularity community detection. An inductive Braun-and-Clarke thematic analysis of the 25 most-upvoted posts in r/stopanusfungi (with dual coding) provided the qualitative layer.

Findings

• The phenomenon was smaller than its cultural footprint suggested: 83.2% of fungi accounts posted ≤10 mushroom comments; only 8.4% posted more than 20.
• Account creation peaked Sept 2020–April 2021; most accounts followed a “spoke” pattern in preferred subreddits rather than coordinated mass campaigns.
• The most-targeted subreddit was the ostensibly anti-fungi r/stopanusfungi — opposition and propagation were intertwined.
• Counterpublics formed on both sides (r/stopanusfungi vs. r/AnusFungiFanClub), each using the mushroom emoji as a symbolic boundary marker.
• Four discussion themes emerged in r/stopanusfungi: reporting the spread, propagating the mushroom, performative/ironic sentiment, and speculation about the phenomenon’s nature — with little actual moderation talk.
• Fungi posts in r/stopanusfungi were rarely downvoted and often upvoted, suggesting the community playfully indulged what it claimed to oppose.
• Whether accounts were “really” bots was treated as secondary by users; cultural relevance and meme freshness mattered more than ontological status.

Connections

This paper offers a cultural counterweight to the predominantly detection- and harm-focused literature on coordinated inauthentic behavior, complicating definitions of “inauthenticity” used in work like Luceri2025-tr, Minici2024-tf, and Mannocci2025-ig. Its concern with how communities themselves perceive and negotiate bot-likeness resonates with Kuznetsova2025-nu and Yang2025-iv, while its Reddit-specific platform vernacular framing complements platform-comparative perspectives such as Hurcombe2025-cs and Graham2025-gp. The argument that human/bot binaries obscure hybrid practice also speaks to debates about AI-generated and semi-automated content surfaced in Di-Marco2025-aa and Gerard2025-br.

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