High-status Reddit users are escaping penalties for sharing misinformation

Reddit users with high karma scores face fewer consequences for posting misinformation than lower-status users do, according to a new study of more than 10,000 posts on the platform.

Soo Young Bae of the University of Massachusetts Amherst and David DeFranza, Assistant Professor of Marketing at University College Dublin’s Michael Smurfit Graduate Business School, analysed 10,020 posts from 185 Reddit users to test whether the platform’s reputation mechanics change how communities react to false content depending on who shares it.

The research was published in the Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication.

The study drew on the Fakeddit dataset, a labelled archive of Reddit posts collected between 2008 and 2019, and measured two responses to each post: its net upvote score and its “discursive divergence”, a metric the researchers built to capture how far comment threads drift into disagreement with the original post.

User status was set using karma, Reddit’s publicly displayed reputation score derived from the balance of upvotes and downvotes an account accumulates.

Accounts above the sample median of 2,271 karma were classed as high-status, and those below it as low-status.

Status changes the response to misinformation

Across the full sample, misinformation drew a worse reception than accurate content, with false posts associated with a 13.15% drop in upvote score and a 20.29% rise in discursive divergence. That pattern reversed for high-karma accounts.

When high-status users posted misinformation, their posts attracted 14.41% more upvotes than the baseline condition of low-status users sharing accurate information, and saw discursive divergence fall by 19.05%.

The absolute figures show the split clearly. A typical low-status user drew 27.77 upvotes when sharing true information but only 18.48 when sharing misinformation, while their discursive divergence climbed from 18.06 to 31.65, a 74.97% increase.

A high-status user drew 33.14 upvotes for accurate content and 34.44 for misinformation, with discursive divergence barely moving, from 16.29 to 17.12.

High-status accounts also received more engagement in general, with a 5.7% increase in upvote scores over low-status users regardless of content type.

The researchers found that high-status users shared misinformation less frequently overall, but that community reactions when they did differed from those directed at lower-status accounts.

Reputation and platform mechanics

The authors frame karma as a platform-specific signal of standing that shapes content visibility, noting that Reddit calculates the score by weighting upvotes and downvotes alongside factors including post age, account age, and contribution type.

Reddit discussion threads also extend beyond the platform: the study cites analysis finding Reddit content appears in 77% of Google search results, and that it has been identified in more than 40% of analysed large language model training cases.

“As social media continues to function as a central venue for information exchange, influential users occupy increasingly visible roles in shaping public discourse.

“Our findings suggest that informational accountability within digital environments may be structured by reputational hierarchies, with implications for how misleading content circulates and gains visibility,” said DeFranza.

The authors note the study covers only Reddit, whose pseudonymous, subreddit-based structure may produce engagement dynamics different from platforms operating under real-name policies, and that the observational data does not establish direct causal effects.

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