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.
Rather than an uptick of far-right, more like a downtick of genuine sensible people in contrast to them.
Those people are all being systematically banned or censored.
Meh, most anybody with a moral compass left when the API changes occurred.
A not insignificant number of people left for lemmy, left lemmy due to tankies, went back to reddit, and got caught up in this latest purge.
Stuck between assholes and idiots.
FR thats so true I also hate Tankies
Have you visited ‘‘Ukraine’’ on lemmy? No need to go to reddit.
I’ve noticed ‘the algorithm’ pushing Russian content through Instagram and Facebook reels. Seemingly unrelated to what I usually browse.
How do you determine if content is “Russian”
Also on YouTube
Haven’t been on reddit in a while, so, no I haven’t noticed.
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)
Yeah this one was really noticeable for me too! I just blocked it for a while but then I unblocked it again and made it a point to downvote any of their posts whenever I saw them.
Expect reddit comments to get removed without notice, users to sporadically get banned here and there, while that uptick continues. Reddit has been pretty good at this for years, in the sense of controlling the narrative without raising any obvious flags. The only thing that’s surprising is that they are no longer treating Reddit as damage control, but just another social network to control. I guess when the authoritarianism is as overt as it currently is, there’s no longer any reason to hide the manipulation as it becomes a liability to allow the already controlled narratives to persist.
Yes, and it’s coupled with a significant amount of censorship and increased bot activity pushing right wing and Russian talking points. It’s simply not an open platform at this point.
And this is by design. Now that they’ve spent the last 20 years collecting your content to teach their bots how to write, all they want now is your attention, not your voice.
The same thing happened to TikTok on inauguration day
The rich are all currently working together to transition the US to a dictatorship ran by an oligarchy.
They are taking over all social media they can buy and trying to control the narrative through chatbots.
It’s every major platform. Even Substack is just so ridiculous at this point. Idk if it’s even necessarily Russians, but just the ability of wealthy people to buy algorithm control and push an agenda.
I tried to use Substack for a min but just kept getting frustrated with the inability to sort feed content of any accounts unless you follow them already. Like something would happen and I would want to discuss it with a large group of people and learn information while it’s still relevant, but there’s no way to do that.
For some reason I kept seeing the same messaging over and over pushed on my feed trying to convince me that Pete Buttigeg is somehow the same as AOC or Bernie Sanders (which logic should tell you wtf no he’s not) then yesterday I see the same account announcing he’s gearing up to run for 2028 and suddenly it all made sense. Typical establishment bullshit but modernized for the Broligarchy takeover.
Paying for social media algorithm control like advertising so that what people get to experience is nothing social, just media pushing a wealthy agenda but tweaked to their individual feed.
you just noticed? it has been there for a while, its infested almost all the subs, that talk about politics or ukraine, or any country.
No? If anything it’s chugging along like normal.
When you ban sensible discussion you’re left with utter nonsense
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.
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.
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
A bit too long but very explanatory, an article about Russia’s trojan horses
https://www.atlanticcouncil.org/in-depth-research-reports/report/kremlin-trojan-horses/
Yes. I noticed it. It’s maddening. On certain things, half or more if the posts are Russian assets or bots. Reddit could do something about it, but in classic corporate fashion, the Russians increased their user engagement metrics, so they won’t do anything about it.
russian trolls are the meat of reddits account and engagement numbers, somewhere like 43-50+% of comments are bots on the site. reddit is just doing performative actions, by going after lowest hanging fruit: OF accounts, advertisers, and people like us.
reddit is basically a hybrid between FACEBOOK/youtube, and X. i also seen significant amount of reposts from truth socials too.
How did you determine that?
I dont doubt it. What kind of topics? And how can you tell they’re bots?
The assets are easy to spot because they spout Russian propaganda, are more articulate, show up suspiciously early in threads, and often post when it is night in the USA. I generally assume the threads with a sheer mass of early comments spouting Russian propaganda are bots, since they have bad grammar, and almost never respond. I guess they could just be from a huge troll farm with bad grammar that almost never response to comments.
Ahhhhhhhh good tips thanks
sometimes they also use buzzwords too, like saying both sides, and or use it in 3rd person.
Also only happens before elections and in communities with a lot of users. They don’t go in to small and moderately sized groups geared toward specific topics.
How do you determine that something is Russian propaganda specifically?
It’s usually not subtle, and are almost always outright lies. Statements along the lines of ‘Ukraine is infested with Nazis, so invasion was justified’, ‘The threat of Ukraine joining NATO caused the war’, ‘Russia is the new Rome’, etc.
Ok, but that doesn’t answer my question. How do you determine that something is Russian propaganda specifically?
politics and news, just look at the comments that are collapses and hidden, alot of them are very unusual, they often use buzzwords, and out of date info. sometimes the hidden comments dont make sense.
How do you tell that they’re Russian bot and assets, and not American or indian or any other country?
