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.
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/
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.
When you ban sensible discussion you’re left with utter nonsense
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.
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.
As the other commenter noted, heebie jeebies. In the US South it has been rounded off to “the heebs.” No racial connotation. Similar to being spooked or apprehensive without a known danger. Slang term. Never thought about it being mistaken.
Another slang term I use that is similar and is easily mistaken is, “bad juju.” It means bad magic, bad luck, or a curse. One day, when I build my dream car, I want it on a vanity plate.
I’m guessing they meant this https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heebie-jeebies
Correct. US southern English.
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
It’s a big site where left-ish content is still reasonably popular. It may be a commercial shithole, but it’s still better than some other popular sites at bringing visibility to anti-nazi pushback (for now at least).
Lemmy eat Snoo’s face…
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.
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.
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)
Canadian elections coming up, shareholders of Reddit probably have a stake in conservative politics… Yeah, current social media is gross.
The Romanian election too
No, this time it’s more.
They have the country, now the concern is to keep it, and preferably steer the US further into following conservative leadership, especially when it comes to an aggressive foreign policy to alienate allies.
Basically the tactic worked so well , they’re doubling down and making it their core strategy moving forward.
Haven’t been on reddit in a while, so, no I haven’t noticed.
Still being on Reddit in 2025 has turned into a real leopards eating my face situation.
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.
Also on YouTube
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.
No? If anything it’s chugging along like normal.
Of course, cause all the cool kids moved to Lemmy. They are the only ones left over there.
