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.
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/
I find the opposite… I find their content moderation has become so f****** horrible and extremely biased view towards the left side of the political / social spectrum… Half the reason why I’ve switched over to Lemmy cuz it at least promote some form of open dialogue
If by recent you mean 5-6 years then yes
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.
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.
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
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.
Reddit will ban anything and everything except right wing bullshit.
I see it on YouTube too. Go to any video of Mark Carney and all the comments are Russian bots spreading misinformation. Go to a video of him a week ago and the comments are universally positive.
youtube is a different cesspool. ever since they announced they wont deny election deniers, its was game over, and then sudden increase in anti-woke, anti-lgbtq+ shorts pop on your feed if your not logged in. and then you see comments on scifi shows too. and showing trash influencers.
You have to allow it though in the name of free speech… Let the potential idiots expose himself, centering people only potentially creates a Streisand effect
I’ve had success with the “not interested in channel” button
I first noticed Russian bots yahoo news comment section…
It was wierdest shot ever than it became mainstream and a lot more sophisticated
on reddit its usually framed in a way “western countries, you are the blame for this and that,etc” or they said they are not “native speakers” which is the biggest telltale. also posting certain articles from questionable sources.
also on politic sub ive seen them collapse or filter out comments that arnt even trolly or spamming, it agrees with everyone on that thread, but the “russian trolls are not deleted”
I think Russian propaganda has always been there it’s just been tweaked over the years to match the audience. Reddit has exiled anyone that doesn’t support Musk, so by default the audience is mainly far-right. And it has definitely gotten out of hand to such an extreme that most of reddit is just dead internet. Bot posts filled with one liner bot comments that rarely actually engage in a discussion about anything.
I just assume any content that pushes extreme divisiveness on issues and refuses to acknowledge any sort of logic or gray area is probably due to Russian bot swarms on most major platforms.
Before I left reddit for the final time, if there was a message that was clearly being suppressed, any attempts to talk about it would be met with the most irrational wall of resistance.
Like I tried to post on a sub for federal workers back in late Jan telling people they should be refusing illegal orders being given to them. It started to get some traction, and then suddenly it was just like a swarm of very irrationally angry comments and downvotes. Like a thread could be almost completely dead, with no activity in the last several hours and I would make a comment like that and get one or two upvotes and then suddenly within a minute it would be sitting at -15 downvotes.
Idk if a community already exists for this but I feel like we need a way to teach people how to spot bot activity the same way we teach people how to spot disinformation.
putin has whole legions of troll farms, which can ban evade too, simply switch thier isp or even proxies.
once you get signicant downvotes, the filters can remove it, or you can get banned and you have to assume people have reported you/brigaded as well.
I had to leave about a year ago because of this.
Have you visited ‘‘Ukraine’’ on lemmy? No need to go to reddit.
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/
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.
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.
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.
I dont doubt it. What kind of topics? And how can you tell they’re bots?
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.
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.
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.
