That may be why the front page of Reddit has become an irresistible target for feel-good messages about brands and businesses. Despite the community's penchant for skepticism, Costco, Taco Bell (in fact, most of the Yum! Brands) and a handful of startups have all made very conspicuous appearances on Reddit in the last year--not via paid ads, but through what at first glance appear to be organic and genuine discussions by Reddit users.

But are they? Could they really be? As someone responsible for my own fair share of marketing stunts, I am suspicious and cynical—I’ll disclose that right up front. I very well may be seeing signs of undue influence where there is only rule-bending behavior, but then again, I've also begun getting requests from clients about the possibility of orchestrating Reddit machinations. So because of this, and because of what I've observed behind the scenes, I'll come out and say it: what's going on Reddit these days has media manipulation written all over it.

Naturally, some of this media manipulation is completely harmless—like brand messaging, which corporations spend billions to propagate, passing as content.

Take Costco, which made the front page of Reddit multiple times via the "Today I Learned" (TIL) subreddit. One post even featured "facts" lifted straight from the Costco corporate site. Altogether, they amassed more than 40,000 upvotes (in other words, user approval) and 3,000 comments chattering about how great Costco is. And it wasn’t the only business getting love.

Through the TIL subreddit, Subaru let everyone know about its environmental concerns. Meanwhile, McDonald’s dominated the section for weeks. Walmart, Air Jordans, Jell-O, DeLorean Motor Company, Netflix and Mountain Dew have also shared the Reddit spotlight. And Volvo owns the fourth most popular TIL post ever, alerting everyone to its good deeds and indirectly marketing its cars as safe.

It’s possible that these positive messages have been posted by legitimate users and fans. Or they could have been posted directly by the self-promoting brands themselves, or perhaps given an extra push by upvoting rings or paid votes. It’s hard to say until someone is caught blatantly violating the rules.

But as a marketer, I find it fascinating that such humblebragging--which clearly benefits these businesses—passes so freely as “facts.” (To be fair: the self-described skeptics at Reddit have identified some embarrassing attempts and tagged them with the “Hail Corporate” tag, but this is comparatively uncommon). Regardless of who generated them, these brand-friendly threads propagate marketing messages for brands, telling their story as “content,” and it's all the more potent because it doesn’t feel like that’s what’s happening.

So whether Redditors know it or not, there is a now a big "deceive me" sign on their back. And marketers are going to try to take advantage of it.

Why would marketers want to target Reddit? It's simple.

All these brands are after the elusive Reddit karma--the goodwill and sheer volume of a community that has the power to make stars (Neil deGrasse Tyson), re-energize careers (Louis C.K.) or stand in as the world's stage (the Obama AMA). They want what Andre Johnson got when a photo of his smiling face and receipts for $19,000 in toys for a children's charity made it to the front page (only, you know, they don't want to actually do their own good deed). Brands have noticed that as soon as the picture started getting votes, it was picked up by smaller blogs, then Deadspin, then USA Today, and on up the media chain. On Reddit alone, the photo got nearly one million views.

Reddit is like any democratic form of government—unless carefully guarded by its leaders and members, its trusts and privileges can be and often are abused. The temptation is so great and the upside is so high.

Reddit understands this, as its general manager Erik Martin told me: “We are always actively looking to uncover brands or anyone else attempting to game Reddit or any form of manipulation. If we catch someone, we will ban them and make it public, as we have done in the past.”

It’s ultimately an arms race between the two interests. With the high stakes, it should come as no surprise that marketers aren’t content to leave pageviews to chance. They aren’t just hoping their efforts make their way onto Reddit. They are creating stunts to take advantage of Reddit’s lack of defenses or, in my view, its gullible proclivities toward viral content.

One trend recently has been designing ads around Reddit’s most popular memes. You can only shake your head at how easily Oreo was able to follow up its recent domination of the front page with an interpretation of the Actual Advice Mallard meme by posting a picture on Instagram that said “Post Your Oreo Marketing Promotion To Reddit: For Foolproof Business Success.” The result: over 600,000 views and 600 comments on Reddit alone. Audi, Cheez-Its and others soon followed suit. More will surely come.

Part of the problem may be that, because it is self-moderated and made up of so many smaller communities, Reddit underestimates the value and attractiveness of the entire community. In a world where these boring (and often genuinely evil) brands have to buy their own Facebook fans, hold enormous sweepstakes or expensive events to get people to interact with them (see: bribes), or spend billions of dollars a year to co-opt popular culture, Reddit threads on which people are actually "learning," or hanging out or chatting are priceless. It's real people doing real things.

And with the barrier to entry being so low--where anyone can post a message--how could the brands not begin to meddle?

I never thought I'd say this about Redditors, who are enamored with their own ability to call bullshit, but they may just not be jaded enough to fully guard against this onslaught.

Because the only response to some of these threads is, c'mon.

This post by JackThreads made its way to the front page with over 2,000 total votes, while only gathering 20 comments. That ratio is a giveaway that something may be off. This post from an account an hour old, posting the title “MY BRAND,” still managed to score over 300,000 views for 1-800-Contacts. Cost? $0. This fairly basic photo blatantly advertising Domino's delivery gathered over 200 comments wondering how it appeared on the front page.

Pretty much none of those posts survive the old "Cui bono?" test. But since no one seems eager to apply it, brands are getting increasingly lazy and brazen.

Like this Bic ad. Is it really from an art student or did the pen company just ask someone with an established account to post it for them? If I was working at Bic, that’s what I would have tried. Why not? The image racked up more than 40,000 upvotes and 1.5 million views.

It's obvious why this kind of attention is attractive to brands. It's also possible to get this kind of attention legitimately, as I well know. In 2009, due to a shipping mix-up, an employee of mine at American Apparel accidentally sent a crate of clothes to the blogger WhatTheBuck (instead of the intended small package of two to three items.) The result was a hysterical video that went on to do nearly 150,000 views.

Unfortunately, I don’t think that’s what’s happening here. These aren’t organic accidents or real fan-to-brand interaction. It’s just fakery--there’s too much of it for that not to be the case. And what's worse, the brands that are engaging in the stunts could easily afford to pay for the ad space on those same pages. In other words, we're not talking about small creative marketing here--we're talking multibillion-dollar corporations using their enormous marketing teams to overwhelm busy volunteer moderators.

And these messages don't stay on Reddit. Reddit is their launching pad. Blogs like Betabeat, Business Insider, Huffington Post, Gawker and hundreds of others troll these sites looking for content they can republish and get traffic from. BuzzFeed, for example, is notorious for republishing content from Reddit. Meaning that one shill thread or photo on Reddit can quickly become pseudo-news and then real news across the web. And do readers understand or see the tainted origins of that content? Of course not.

It’s an obnoxious cycle. Reddit replaced the old Digg.com, which had become increasingly dominated by spam, trolls and fake news. Now it’s fighting off those same forces. With the new and improved Digg gaining traffic, despite unfriendliness to self-promoters, will Reddit find some way to purge itself of marketers? I hope so.

The site is at a crossroads about policing its sources and links. Usually Reddit makes the right choices in these positions, as it did when it banned sites like The AtlanticWire and BusinessWeek for spam and upvoting their own links.

I hope Reddit follows in its own footsteps once more. Or we’ll all be hailing our new corporate Redditors.

Ryan Holiday is the bestselling author of  Trust Me I’m Lying: Confessions of a Media Manipulator and a PR strategist for brands and writers.

Screencap

For the love of Christ, will you social media gurus please learn to change your passwords once in a while? A scant 24 hours after someone hijacked Burger King's Twitter account and began pumping out pro-McDonald's sentiment, it appears Jeep's verified account has now been compromised.

The account's about page now reads: "The official Twitter handle for the Jeep® -- Just Empty Every Pocket, Sold To Cadillac =[ #OpMadCow #OpWhopper." The avatar is now a Cadillac logo, and the  background picture is now a low-rider with a McDonald's paint job. Jeep is now tweeting things like, "You'll never catch @50cent ridin in a Dirty Ass @Jeep !!!!#ForDaLuLz #FreeJeep."

It looks like it's the same perpetrators as yesterday and pretty much just a total rerun. This, for example, is an awfully similar joke to what we saw yesterday with Burger King:

We got sold to @cadillac because we caught our employees doing these in the bathroom =[ twitter.com/Jeep/status/30…

— Jeep (@Jeep) February 19, 2013

We can't wait for Elon Musk to connect this back to the New York Times.

(Update: 3:08 p.m.) Gizmodo suggests the guilty party is a DJ from New England (ain't it always?) named Tony Cunha, a.k.a. iThug. Hey, while we're dispensing digital survival tips, here's some advice for all you hackers out there: Don't start bragging about your exploits to cute girls on Facebook.

iThug followed up on one of those Twitter shoutouts by bragging to a girl (and pal from the Boston music scene) in question with his real-life Facebook account (deleted immediately after @Jeep was taken over, mind you). Using his real life name. He just had to show off (this post has also been deleted post-Jeep).

(Update: 3:18 p.m.) Okay, now this is just getting goddamn ridiculous: There's a possibility the MTV and BET accounts have now been hacked, as well. One minute MTV was tweeting about sideboob at the Spring Breakers premiere; the next it was "ON A SCALE OF 1 TO RATCHET, HOW MUCH BETTER ARE THE @BET AWARDS THAN THE VMAS???" BET just has an MTV avatar and "this is a takeover!!!" on the about page.

How many brand accounts have to get hacked before we actually get two-factor authentication?

However, there's another, more excruciatingly stupid possibility, which is that this could all be some big Viacom viral marketing scheme, in which case fuck you, Viacom. Reuters' Matthew Keys points out that an MTV employee tweeted "Everyone watch @MTV right now... #MTVHACK" right before the takeover.

We've reached out to Twitter for comment and will update if we hear anything back.

(Update: 3:55 p.m.) MTV has now owned up to its attempt to bullshit the Internet:

We totally Catfish-ed you guys. Thanks for playing! <3 you, @bet. ;)

— MTV (@MTV) February 19, 2013

As this Betabeat reporter's mama is fond of saying: It's not funny and it's not cute, guys. It's also a hell of a note that hacked brand accounts are now common enough they're treated as their very own viral marketing opportunity.

(Photo: Twitter)

The official Burger King Twitter account has been hacked, and when it comes to terrible fast food, the hacker appears to have an allegiance to McDonald's.

"We just got sold to McDonalds! Look for McDonalds in a hood near you," tweeted the account about 20 minutes ago. The Burger King avatar has been changed to the McDonald's logo.

The account appears to have been hacked by the Defonic Team Screen Name Club, a member of which was responsible for hacking Paris Hilton's Sidekick way back when. @BurgerKing has tweeted numerous references to #DTSNC since it was taken over by the hacker.

Anonymous also appears to be in on the joke. The hackers tweeted "Follow us @YourAnonNews #OpMadCow," which was retweeted by @YourAnonNews.

https://twitter.com/BurgerKing/status/303549927508832257

https://twitter.com/BurgerKing/status/303552785008435201

https://twitter.com/BurgerKing/status/303553277151281152

https://twitter.com/BurgerKing/status/303559106197876737

https://twitter.com/BurgerKing/status/303556211771576320

Update: McDonald's has denied involvement in the hack of the Burger King account:

https://twitter.com/McDonalds/status/303575465237549056

Wendy's also claims to have an alibi:

https://twitter.com/Wendys/status/303576501415186432

The @BurgerKing account has been suspended by Twitter.

Update 2:

@BurgerKing is back up and running, but it has lost all of it's followers--a real shame since the hackers helped pushed the brand over 100,000 before being shut down. The hacker's tweets are also still visible, so this was just a shitty day for Burger King's social media team all around.

Another rainy day in NYC. (Photo: wired New York)

Zynga has lost another exec. The struggling company's chief game designer Brian Reynolds has resigned. [VentureBeat]

Sorry, Facebook: Twitter is now the fastest-growing social platform in the world. No data yet on who owns the universe, though. [GlobalWebIndex]

Netflix wants to become the next HBO. So, lots of shows with gratuitous nudity and cursing just 'cuz, "It's premium cable, man." [The Verge]

McDonald's is the new study hall. Hey, it's not like the library has french fries. [Wall Street Journal]

Startup visas may soon become a thing after the President endorsed them in a recent speech. But what about all those lawless seafaring incubators? [Huffington Post]

The hottest game in town. (Photo: Rembert Browne, Instagram)

We're stretching into yet another day of no power downtown. If you're seeking Wifi, you could simply head north until you find somewhere, but it's probably best to proceed with a plan. Hence, we've rounded up a list of places you might want to try:

Networks: 

• In a convenient coincidence, Microsoft's sponsorship of free wireless at more than 200 Boingo hotspots across the city starts today. Look for "Free Wifi by Microsoft" to get online. Updated: Boingo tells us the best way to find one of these locations is this: "If you unselect "Trusted" and "Unverified" under "Hotspot Quality," this will isolate the "Certified" hotspots," many of which are sponsored.
• Boingo's Wi-Finder app also aggregates locations with free wireless. But take any suggested spots with a grain of salt, as they don't tell you whether those hotspots are actually currently functional. (It's a good bet none of the ones downtown are.)

• For those of you in New Jersey, Comcast has temporarily opened its Xfinity Wifi hotspots up to the public. Here's a map of available locations.

Coworking

• For startups seeking desk space, there's #SandyCoworking. Here's a list of companies and organizations offering to take in the disrupted, and there's also a crowdsourced map of options, including midtown's AlleyNYC, the offices of ff Venture Capital and Brooklyn's Cafe Royal.
• The Ace Hotel, the impromptu startup hub, currently has power and therefore its usual free Wifi. (Unfortunately, looks like Soho House is electricity-less.)

Chains / Restaurants 

• Starbucks outposts that still have electricity have free Wifi.
• McDonalds is another option. Check for a location here.
• Guest of a Guest points out many uptown hotels have available Wifi, including the tony Waldorf Astoria. It also looks like the Soho Grand has free Wifi.
• Barnes & Noble locations offer free Wifi. Midtown options to try include Lexington and 54th, and 5th Avenue and 46th.

Libraries

• New York Public Library branches offer free Wifi. However, the flagship Stephen A. Schwarzman Building on 42nd is still closed.
• We hear NYU's Bobst Library has been offering access to its lobby for Wifi and charging, but that might be a limited time offer as the library gets converted to housing for evacuated students.

Outdoors/de facto

• Try one of the payphones that's been converted into a hotspot. Convenient Manhattan locations include 458 Seventh Avenue, 28 West 48th Street, 410 Madison Avenue, and 1609 Broadway.
• Here are tethering instructions.
• Moxy has set up one of its charging station (with free built-in Wifi) in a Chase ATM on 41st Street and 3rd Avenue. Not ideal, but a good place to check your email.
• Some of the hotspots in public plazas and parks are likely working. That said, do not go into city parks in search of working wireless, as there's a lot of tree inspecting left to do.

Of course, if all that fails, there are always bars, which never, ever let New Yorkers down.

Have you discovered an accommodating coffee shop? Found a free hotspot? Hit us up at tips@betabeat.com. 

(Photo: bioethics.net)

The Federal Trade Commission is looking to change regulatory lawsthat that protect children's privacy on the Internet. Although it's legal right now, a slew of apps and popular websites collect data and pictures from young users. In the most cringe-worthy example, pictures of children that were uploaded to a “get in the picture with Ronald McDonald” game in were kept by McDonald's in directories that were publicly available to anyone who wanted access to them. McDonald's tells the Times that they've now "blocked public access to several directories on the site."

The new laws say children’s websites would be required to obtain parents’ permission before tracking kids around the Web for advertising purposes.

But while government restrictions may help protect innocent children, it's hard not to feel that the responsibility (and the biggest hope for keeping kids safe) lies with their parents. After all, children don't only stick to apps directed to their demographic.

Instructing them in the basic--don’t give out your birthday, don’t put up any pictures of yourself, don’t talk to strangers, and don’t do anything you wouldn’t do if we weren't here--would go a long way.

Earlier this year, the Times covered what happens when kids find porn on the Internet. The article's conclusion was that no matter what parents can try to do, their kids are going to explore the endless web and it's up to the parents to explain what's right and wrong to do online.

The same rule for parenting should apply here. In today's article about the FTC's plan, the Times quotes a mother of two, who said:

“We are teaching our kids to ask, ‘What is the company getting from you and what are they going to do with that information?”

She's on the right track.

Unfortunately, when mom’s only password is “password” and dad keeps giving away his social security number to Nigerian princes, kids might have to teach themselves--or learn the hard way.

Just hanging out, maybe collecting some emails. (Photo: flickr.com/paul_everett82

Ronald McDonald probably isn't the first person who comes to mind when parents think "internet dangers," but you probably don't want your kids getting unsolicited emails about the glories of french fries, either.

Well, bad news: The New York Times reports that several advocacy organizations have filed a complaint with the FTC, alleging that Micky D's and four other companies--Viacom, General Mills, Subway and Turner--are exploiting a legal loophole in their online marketing to kids.

In true corporate fashion, however, these companies aren't doing anything so straightforward as simply asking for 9-year-olds' email addresses. The Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act in fact requires sites to get parents' "verifiable consent"  before they can collect the personal info of kids younger than 13.

But that's just so involved, you know? And there are McNuggets to be peddled. Instead, HappyMeal.com and five other sites stand accused of an underhanded-looking work-around:

But, in complaints to the F.T.C., the coalition says six popular Web sites aimed at children have violated that law by encouraging children who play brand-related games or engage in other activities to provide friends’ e-mail addresses — without seeking prior parental consent.

Say what?

Obtaining information about adults’ social networks to e-mail marketing messages to their friends is a common industry practice called “tell a friend” or “refer a friend.” But now an increasing number of children’s sites are using the technique by inviting children to make customized videos promoting certain products, for example, and then sending them to friends.

There is, in fact, a loophole in the law that allows companies to collect friends' addresses and send one--and only one--email, and the companies who responded to the Times piece insist that they are fully compliant with existing laws.

However, let's put this in its proper context: The FTC is currently updating rules regarding kids' online privacy, taking into account technologies like cookies (of the tracking variety, not the Cookie Monster kind).

Better get to hamburglering those email addresses while you still can, McDonald's.

Mr. Mann (Photo: EyeTap Blog)

On Monday, a post by University of Toronto professor Steve Mann about an attack he experienced at a Parisian McDonald's made it to the front page of Hacker News. In an emotional retelling, Mr. Mann recounted how, while on a family vacation in Paris, a trio of McDonald's employees physically harassed and abused him for wearing a pair of computer glasses called "EyeTap Digital Glass," a version of which he's donned since the 1980s.

Apparently accustomed to shifty stares and inappropriately-timed questions, Mr. Mann carries around paperwork from his doctor that outlines the device's functionality, in order to quell any nervousness or dark fascination that might arise while traveling. Of course, stuffing your face with french fries at a fast food doesn't usually require furnishing medical paperwork.

The eyeglass system Mr. Mann was wearing is permanently attached and can't be removed without special tools. It includes a literal retina display that turns your eye into a camera. As such, the eye that uses the display has the appearance of  a digital glass eye, and also has the added benefit of making Mr. Mann look like a badass member of the Borg.

According to the blog post, three McDonald's employees attempted to rip the display off of his face, and ripped up the medical paperwork that accompanied it. The motivation here is supposedly that you aren't allowed to take pictures in a McDonalds, and the employees became angry when they thought Mr. Mann was recording them.

Indeed, Mr. Mann did snap photos of his alleged assailants. But ironically it was the employees messing with the device that caused it to record. Typically, the device only stores image temporarily. But, as Mr. Mann told Fox News, "[the person who allegedly assaulted Mann] was the person who took all the pictures in the last hour or so, by causing the computer to be broken.” Oops.

The bizarre event immediately ricocheted across the tech sphere. Fox News called Mr. Mann a "makeshift human cyborg" and ran an especially Matrix-looking photo of him wearing the eye glass and a gold, netted brain reading device attached to his skull. "First attack on cyborg," cried an ominous headline on the singularity futurist blog Kurzweil AI,  implying that this will be the first of many violent offenses against our transhuman brethren.

It's hard not to see Mr. Mann’s McDonald’s incident as a portent about the future of wearable computing. With Google claiming that the first version of Project Glass, the company's own augmented reality glasses, will be consumer ready as early as 2014, how the mainstream will react to a new swath of freshly minted cyborgs is a concept that most non-futurists haven't really begun to understand.

At the heart of the issue is the matter of privacy, a basic human right that the openness of the Internet has slowly chiseled away at over the last decade. We eagerly serve up location-encoded data and intimate dispatches about our puny lives, but wearable computing introduces an entirely new problem: How will we deal with the concept that eyeglasses with recording technology could mean we are on stage, 24 hours a day? Will our lives become ever-more performative, the stress that we already feel from being constantly tethered to our mobile devices amplified by the fact that anyone--at any time--could be watching you?

And what of police information requests, which are already so rampant for things like cell phone data. If the police can subpoena Google to deliver the information from your glasses, you'll never be able to get away with anything. Better luck next time, criminals and chronic masturbators.

The technology that invades our privacy today is largely self-inflicted. Don't want to give Facebook all your personal info? It's as easy as not signing up for an account. With wearable computing, even if you personally opt out, there will always be some other excitedly plugged-in soul near you who is capable of recording your every move.

Perhaps this is what the inexcusably abusive McDonald's employees were thinking when they attacked Mr. Mann. More than likely, though, is that they weren't thinking at all, and simply experiencing a visceral reaction to the unknown. Unable to properly parse their feelings about seeing the "world's first cyborg," they instead resorted to violence, and Mr. Mann suffered for their ignorance.

Before 2013, when Google churns out the clunky "Project Glass" and then Apple inevitably corners the market with a hipper design called iGlass (really, this stuff writes itself), perhaps we need to focus on educating each other about what the future of wearable computing might look like.

There's still one thing about our first encounter with human-on-cyborg violence that's left us scratching our heads: Why was Mr. Mann eating at a McDonald’s in Paris? Quel horror.