You missed the point. Are those news websites used by the bot owned by the same person or corporate entity, and are they trying to use reddit as free ad revenue was my point.

Just throwing this out there, but don't all the news / Politics / link sharing sub posts consist 90% of RSS feed bots? If you go to any news sub, it is literally just an RSS feed of all the major news organizations. It's completely pointless to read them now, as the points don't do anything anymore to help rate which news is more important to people through the voting system. As well, this research doesn't do much to look at which particular stories are being pushed the most through vote manipulation, which is the primary concern. Votes and views control what content most users see, not whether a link is posted via an rss feed. I guess what i want to say overall is: This is a lot of research into something that we already knew. Thank you for putting forth the effort to create a good visual representation of how pretty much any and every news sub works, but you have not really touched on the subject of how they are abusing votes to create pseudo editors of the new pages on reddit, and you haven't been able to provide information on which stories or which story sources are being pushed the most. It would be more interesting to look at what they are posting, and see if there are any correlations with certain domain names, and see if those domain names are owned by related individuals or the same individual. That would be more interesting.