Spam is becoming an increasing trust and measurement problem for brands as AI floods the social media market.
In fact, Reddit recently reported blocking 23 million spam views per day before they reached a human user, yet user exposure to spam only fell by 20% from January to March 2026.
If the social media environment is now shaped by undetected AI-generated content, bots, and engagement, how should brands think about their next strategy move?
In conversation with CX Today, Sarah Stephenson, Social Director at tmp, highlights how these results may indicate a larger issue.
“It does feel impossible to know the exact number because I believe platforms only report on what they detect and remove, verses what they miss," she explained.
"They themselves might not even realise how much content is being missed! However, this recent Reddit stat does highlight that AI content is being created at an enormous scale.”
A New Era Of Social Uncertainty
AI's involvement in the customer journey is becoming more apparent than ever, as 94% of buying groups now reportedly use LLMs or AI assistants during the research process.
AI spam, in particular, is creating a new challenge for marketers because the issue is no longer just the presence of spam, but the scale at which it can influence the social media environment.
Since its launch, social platforms have always dealt with fake accounts, low-quality content, and manipulated engagement, however the introduction of AI tools has increased the speed and volume at which this activity can be produced.
If an environment becomes influenced by automated or inauthentic activity, it becomes harder for marketers to understand what audiences are actually seeing and responding to.
Reddit’s recent success in removing tens of millions of contents from the platform with user exposure to spam having only decreased by around 20% suggests that while detection systems are improving, the amount of AI-generated and manipulated content are a result of the ongoing reality for marketers operating on large social platforms.
As a result, brands using social platforms can see the activity that has been identified and removed, but they cannot know with certainty how much content is going undetected.
“This recent Reddit stat does highlight that AI content is being created at an enormous scale, and because it is being blocked at such a consistent high volume, it does give a lot of hope that the platforms detection systems are constantly improving,” Stephenson notes.
“As the detection systems improve, so do the AI content generation tools.”
Building Trust In Noisy Feeds
The rise of AI-generated spam and manipulated activity also means traditional signals such as likes, followers, and shares are more difficult to interpret.
With Reddit now removing nearly 2 million inauthentic votes every day, this key visibility metric highlights the wider issue that applies across social platforms, where engagement signals can also be influenced by automated activity.
For marketers, this creates uncertainty around whether performance data reflects genuine human attention, not meaning social media metrics no longer have value, but that brands need to be more careful about how they interpret them.
