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.

  • Xanthobilly@lemmy.world
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    5 months ago

    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.

    • Ledericas@lemm.ee
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      5 months ago

      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)

    • aubeynarf@lemmynsfw.com
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      5 months ago

      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.

    • Stache_@lemmy.ml
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      5 months ago

      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

  • FauxLiving@lemmy.world
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    5 months ago

    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.

    • ssillyssadass@lemmy.world
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      5 months ago

      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.

      • Ledericas@lemm.ee
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        5 months ago

        questioning any reddit habits will get removed, if your not a mod yourself.

      • FauxLiving@lemmy.world
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        5 months ago

        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.

  • Darkcoffee@sh.itjust.works
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    5 months ago

    Canadian elections coming up, shareholders of Reddit probably have a stake in conservative politics… Yeah, current social media is gross.

  • Komodo Rodeo@lemmy.world
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    5 months ago

    Sure I have. I’ve also noticed an uptick in far-right users reporting accounts to get them suspended and banned. For people who jump so readily to calling their ideological opponents snowflakes, they’re remarkably quick to run to Mods, who’re disappointingly happy to accommodate fasch rhetoric.

      • Ledericas@lemm.ee
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        5 months ago

        it actually accelerated after trump won, from there we saw ban wave after ban wave that was barely targetting misinformation trolls. when i went on another forum after my early FEBURARY BAN, people recorded 3 ban waves by that time, and the midst of a 4th one, i think the luigi, upvoting is the 5th one so far.

        there was nother user on the forum that recorded the statistics, there was massive surge of shadowbannings on the week i was permabanned. it is statistically relevant since theses users are the ones have 100s too thousands of accts getting shadowbanned.(yes they use it to promote advertisements)

      • surph_ninja@lemmy.world
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        5 months ago

        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.

        • inb4_FoundTheVegan@lemmy.world
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          5 months ago

          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.

          • surph_ninja@lemmy.world
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            5 months ago

            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.

    • Ledericas@lemm.ee
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      5 months ago

      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.

  • BrainInABox@lemmy.ml
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    5 months ago

    How do you tell the difference between Russian propaganda and right wing American propaganda?

  • EarlGrey@discuss.tchncs.de
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    5 months ago

    At the risk of going against the flow here…no?

    I keep seeing Lemmy posts 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 people on here claim it is.