Is anyone else noticing an uptick in far-right content and Russian propaganda on reddit lately?
To me it almost seems like reddit has started pushing it.
I don’t buy the whole Russia thing because it takes the burden of guilt off of the admin and makes them look like pawns. No, the admin would be this way regardless of Russia. The Russia connection is a symptom of MAGA, not the cause.
This is naive. Russia has been waging psychological warfare on us for literally decades. They are open about this. They’ve written books about it. It is LITERALLY Russian military doctrine.
I am NOT advocating for marching on Moscow. But to ignore the psychological warfare that was amplified by, yes willing conspirators which does indicate we DO have a root problem here too, is to ignore the circumstances that brought us here.
We are only here because of the combination of old-school crazies in the Heritage Foundation controlling Fox News/trad. media and our 4chan billionaires pushing all sorts of propaganda from the depths of the internet & 4chan, which is pretty much all Russian/chinese/iranian propaganda aimed at destabilizing trust within the west.
Sure people are stupid and like conspiracies — but the conspiracy sphere is EXACTLY a target of Russian propaganda because the user base already distrusts the government and they’re a user base that’s willing to push their beliefs onto others if you can convince them… see QANON. Qanon has deep ties to both Russia AND to the tech bros, namely Thiel and Musk.
This is only possible because of the MARRIAGE OF THESE IDEAS. They are equally to blame. We are at war with Russia as much as we are at war with our own traitorous billionaires.
Lately?
My sentiments exactly. Been an increasing problem over there since 2016 that I noticed but I’m sure there was this bullshittery there before and I just wasn’t in the subreddits where it festered.
Yes thats why I left
I’m one week reddit free after 2 bans. I honestly don’t miss it. Recently it’s been all right-wing propaganda and conspiracies, getting banned for innocuous things, and general hate towards other users. That platform is dying fast. Here’s to Lemmy supremacy! 🥂
Maybe also has something to do with the uptick of banning left leaning people talking about the damage Trump and Musk are doing? There have been a TON of people here saying their 10+ year old accounts have been banned.
No longer on Reddit. That’s why I’m here. Kept getting banned because, “who knows”?
“Why am I banned?”
silence
They’re getting a lot of pressure from the Trump administration to clamp down on leftist content and ease regulations on right wing stuff
It’s everywhere. I’m guessing they have a lot extra free money to spend on propaganda now that they allies with the US.
WTF is Reddit?
Seriously though get off that site, it’s not good for you.
Rather than an uptick of far-right, more like a downtick of genuine sensible people in contrast to them.
Sensible people? I seem to vaguely remember those there…
At the risk of going against the flow here…no?
People keep talking about how Reddit is going hard fascist…but half the posts on /r/all are about Trump being a rapist, or celebrating CyberTruck arson, or Luigi memes, etc.
I deleted my Reddit account during the third-party app bullshit and exclusively view it from the old site or OpenArtemis, so I’m not exactly going to defend them, but it isn’t nearly as bad as I’ve been seeing here.
I’m just seeing a lot of sanitation of reddit. Must be making it advertiser friendly or kissing up to the admin.
The russian propagandist has no shame these days. They openly flaunt their nationality and their influence over US media. It’s shameful and americans should ostracize these people. They are all soo scared of brown people voting in their election but give no shits when it comes to russians, a foreign adversary, pushing their agenda through propagandizing americans.
Reddit didn’t start pushing it, it just stopped fighting it.
They lost a lot of human users and moderators over the last few years (during the API changes, for example) and their place was filled with “power mods” who run multiple large subreddits.
The moderator:user ratio has gone way down and so the people who game social media to push their messaging (nation states interested in disrupting the US) are essentially unchecked.
Now, instead of dumb bots that just copy/paste comments we have LLM-enabled ‘users’ (or even entire subreddits) that only exist to amplify these messages and manipulate the karma system to suppress opposition.
You don’t need to be a moderator if you can just use your network of hundreds of thousands of bots to downvote people out of the conversation or to boost articles to the front page.
from what ive gathered, its 92 mods controlling over 500+subs, i think these are the powermods. and additionally some of these are admins themselves? or mods that are in cahoots with reddit admins.
And yet as short staffed as they are, these mods always manage to suppress pro Luigi and anti musk content
Remember the government saying that they were going to treat anti-musk vandalism as terrorism?
They’re not doing that by issuing press releases.
They’re looking for “terrorists” on social media and their subpoenas to social media sites let the site know the kind of content that the government is labeling terrorism and then the site starts banning that content.
Meanwhile they’re using that terrorism declaration to do things like charge protesters with crimes. For the ones who are on visas (like students, professors, etc) they are using those crimes as an excuse to revoke their visas and deport them.
Reddit is censoring things that are being pursued by law enforcement because their is no safe harbor laws that protect sites from things the government declares as illegal.
Reddit censorship is reflecting federal law enforcement priorities.
I would be less worried about deleted posts and more worried about who’s houses are being raided due to “terrorism” charges because they’re too vocal about healthcare reform or protested in the vicinity of property damage to Musk properties
its easy when they have AI/bot to filter out that, dont need much people to monitor those comments.
AI has been banning people left and right as of recently.
Easier when admins do it for them
I just wish there was some way to educate the Redditors on this. Let them know what their Admins allow, and what they support. But I’m pretty sure if you just make a post on Reddit saying something like “Reddit is bad go somewhere else” it will be removed.
For the average person, the effort that it would require far outweighs any morality issues. Even if they knew the whole story.
We should still educate people, but that isn’t going to move the needle by itself.
questioning any reddit habits will get removed, if your not a mod yourself.
Reddit has been protecting russian bot farms for almost a decade now.
they pretend to a sweep on occasion, only to have them come back even worst than before. how do we know? we know political posts suddenly becomes super quiet of any “both sides ranting” temporarily. and resemble more like lemmy posts of politics.
and now Israel has a vested interest with reddit, because of the gaza conflict.
