Example of ATS Manipulating the Flag System

Here's a typical example of ATS manipulating its flag system to make a thread seem much more popular and important than it actually is.

The example here is of a thread for a video that's a part of a new ATS distraction campaign in the form of YouTube videos where someone who tries to pass for a news pundit gives his personal (and ATS-approval) opinions for several minutes.

ATS wants to try to make these videos catch on, so one of the things they do is artificially inflate the number of flags that the threads about these videos receive.

This is the thread in question.

You can see the thread was really off to a good start in the first four hours, compared to most ATS threads.  27 flags in 4 hours really is not bad.

But then to almost instantly shoot up to 139 flags, and then gain no more than 12 more flags in the next several days after this extremely brief and intense flag boost, is more than suspicious.  It's pretty blatant manipulation of the flag system, and the staff has to either know about it or else contribute to it directly.

Though members often star and flag threads at the same time, you can also see that the number of stars for this post never got anywhere near the number of flags.  The stars probably were not manipulated and give a better idea of how many flags the thread should actually have: about four times less than the number shown.



Here's the specifics on the data collected:

The thread was started on September 16, 2014, at 7:14 PM  Eastern Standard Time, at which time of course it had 0 flags.

By 11:30 PM (over 4 hours later), it had 27 flags.

At 1:48 AM (2 hours and 18 minutes after that), it had 139 flags, but still only 14 stars.

By 11:10 AM on September 17 (over 10 hours since reaching 139 flags), the thread had gained only 7 more flags, to bring it to 146.

By September 19th it was at 151 flags, and as of this post (about a half hour from midnight, beginning September 23rd) it remains at exactly 151 flags.

  

This screenshot is from before 2 AM on Sept. 17th.

Since then it has grown very little compared to its massive growth spurt,

which was obviously from someone manipulating the flag system.

Note there are 139 flags but only 14 stars.  Not normal.