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.
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.
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.
questioning any reddit habits will get removed, if your not a mod yourself.
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.
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
It’s been going on since 2016, and getting worse each day. The main change I’ve noticed post November 2024 is r/conservative keeps making it to the front page of popular despite having a much lower upvote tally.
yup, ive been saying that too, r/conservative was there so often i blocked it from my feed. then you have wierd right wing subs that try to pretend its both sides, like trueunpopularopion, or trueoffmychest, even askreddit wierdly becomes a rightwing sub sometimes.
i have a hunch the mods is either in cahoots with the admins themselves(many mods are known to have direct line of contact/relations with them)
No. I’m using Lemmy.
Besides that, who cares. I’m using Lemmy.
There is plenty of coordinated inauthentic behavior here. You’ll notice it when the first few comments of every post somewhere like /c/politics consistently reinforce the “talking point of the month” to sow division among groups not aligned with Russian success.
I call it getting the heebs. Seeing a weird turn of phrase will set it off for me. This is my first time experiencing it from a leftist slant.
Used to watch the Russians clock in and go to work on TheDonald back in the day. They were really obvious.
The AstroTurf here is pretty nice, smells so much like grass you about can’t smell the bullshit. Better than Reddit, or Digg, or Slashdot, for now.
Maybe it’s time to take a trip down the Mother Road and try Usenet for actual discussion.
Uh, maybe don’t call it that.
I’m guessing they meant this https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heebie-jeebies
Correct. US southern English.
You have this phrase all up the East coast into Canada fyi
If it goes that far, it’s probably all over the US.
When I first joined Lemmy over a year ago after the Reddit API changes, I unknowingly joined a server that had a large right wing community. So I’ve been seeing a bunch of that stuff on Lemmy for a while now
i see alot of conservative ones pop up, and any lemmy.ml post is also disengenious and leans heavily to the right.
I’m confused. I thought .ml were left, like far far extreme left.
tankies are left in exactly the same way North Korea is democratic
No. You’re seeing what the news looks like without USAID funding propaganda to drown out the truth. A majority of media outlets in Ukraine were taking money from them.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2025/02/07/ukraine-russia-independent-media-trump-usaid/
Hey OP, I found another one
This reminds me of when the media & government dropped the Iraq wmd claims, and admitted they’d fabricated the whole thing. Even when they stopped pushing the lie and confessed the weapons never existed, so many people invested in the hoax took a long while to accept the truth.
You’ll catch up.
Ah yes. Prove a ludicrous statement by talking about an unrelated one, classic whataboutism. Look, either you’re aim is to spread propaganda or, more likely, you’ve swollowed enough yourself and totally lost the plot.
No. Im just a leftist. I’m used to knowing things too early. You’ll catch up eventually, and then pretend you knew the truth the whole time. I know how this goes.
A leftist ranting about the evils of USAID.
lmao, okay sweetie. That’s nice. 😂
The acronym is an intentional misnomer to mislead people about their mission, and they’ve spent a lot of money to craft their image. It’s understandable to mistakenly believe it’s focused on aid.
Peddle your BS to someone more gullible.
Either give it a rest or take that shit back to .ml where it’s tolerated.
Lol “the truth”
You believe these media companies were not taking money from USAID?
Canadian elections coming up, shareholders of Reddit probably have a stake in conservative politics… Yeah, current social media is gross.
Who’s on Reddit?
Apparently far-right and russian people/bots.
Fuck Reddit. Lemmy is worlds better outside of missing a few niche communities
Let’s make some lemmy servers for those niche communities then
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.
How do you tell the difference between Russian propaganda and right wing American propaganda?
They’re the same picture.
What?
I was making a joke using the meme from The Office where corporate asks what the difference between two pictures is. I was using your comment as a setup to insinuate that right wing propaganda is the same as Russian propaganda.
Russia also does left wing propaganda. Their goal is chaos and division.
