Earlier today, some of X’s best and brightest soldiers began posting about a “‘Reddit Task’ Content Farm” for Marathon. The allegation is that Sony and Bungie have been paying people, through a shady Discord server, to promote positive posts about Marathon on Reddit. “There is a ‘Reddit Task’ content farm for Marathon,” Pirat_Nation declared, just one of many accounts to take this claim and run with it. And no. No, there is not.
Their source? This post over on Reddit. It features several screenshots of a Discord server, the details of which have been blacked out, that shows the admin of said server promoting Marathon-related Reddit offers. “MARATHON LAUNCH DAY REMINDER: Starting tomorrow, Marathon assigned tasks can now be claimed every 6 hours. Take advantage of this reduced cooldown until Monday 6:00 AM,” reads one of the posts in the screenshots.
In short, it appears as if they’re paying people to create and boost positive Marathon posts on Reddit, which is a practice known as astroturfing. Pretty damning stuff. In many American states and countries, astroturfing is illegal and can earn you some pretty hefty fines from the likes of the U.S. Federal Trade Commission. Sony and Bungie would be in a lot of trouble…if it wasn’t complete bullshit, that is.
If you take a look at some of the screenshots in the post, which I’ve backed up here just in case the person who faked this tries to delete their “proof” out of shame, you can see in the top right that they’ve accidentally done a poor job of cropping out the server’s name in the Search bar. By overlaying Discord’s font with the text they’ve poorly cropped out, I was able to figure out that the name of the server in question is “Reddit Circle.”
Reddit Circle is the name of the Discord server used by TaskPost, a self-described “platform for completing Reddit posting tasks and earning cryptocurrency.” By making a TaskPost account and joining their private server through the TaskPost website, I was able to join Reddit Circle and view the posts in question.
As you can see, none of these posts actually mentions Marathon in any way, shape, or form. It’s made-up nonsense, engineered in some kind of bid to fake some ill will against Sony and Bungie. It’s likely part of the ongoing campaign by far-right chuds on X to dunk on Marathon, folks who are, for some reason, obsessed with the game’s playercount numbers. That’s probably why the original poster on Reddit also posted this same nonsense in the “GamerGate Discussion” subreddit where folks, unsurprisingly, also fell for it.
Also, just in case whoever made this up tries to use this as an out, I included the timestamps of when the posts were edited on Discord in my screenshots. They likely thought that picking posts on Discord that have already been edited would serve as some kind of backup excuse if the posts were found, so they could say that the server owners edited the references to Marathon out of their messages. However, as you can see, these messages were edited within the same minute that they were posted.
Oh, but just in case you were curious how someone managed to make such a convincing fake screenshot, here’s one I’ve edited myself. It’s actually quite simple to do. Log in to Discord on your browser, open up Inspect Element, and type in whatever you want.
Maybe the folks on X should leave the investigative journalism to the real journalists in the future, hm?
