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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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
Easier when admins do it for them