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.
The russian propagandist has no shame these days. They openly flaunt their nationality and their influence over US media. It’s shameful and americans should ostracize these people. They are all soo scared of brown people voting in their election but give no shits when it comes to russians, a foreign adversary, pushing their agenda through propagandizing americans.
No longer on Reddit. That’s why I’m here. Kept getting banned because, “who knows”?
Rather than an uptick of far-right, more like a downtick of genuine sensible people in contrast to them.
How do you tell the difference between Russian propaganda and right wing American propaganda?
They’re the same picture.
What?
I was making a joke using the meme from The Office where corporate asks what the difference between two pictures is. I was using your comment as a setup to insinuate that right wing propaganda is the same as Russian propaganda.
Ok, but that makes no sense.
Makes pretty good sense to me. They’re using the meme format to imply that there are no differences between the two, i.e. right wing propaganda is just Russian propaganda.
Ok, but they’re too different, mutually exclusive countries.
Yes, that is what makes it a joke, the subversion of expectations.
Russia also does left wing propaganda. Their goal is chaos and division.
Ok? What doers that have to do with my question?
Their goal is chaos and division.
How did you determine this?
Because it’s painfully obvious to the point that Russia has literally explicitly admitted to it.
I only frequent one closed group on Reddit - the only reason I still have my account. I gather this group to be quite safe. The main page, though, is a mess, USNazis and Russians way to frequent.
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.
If by recent you mean 5-6 years then yes
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/
Lol “the truth”
Hey OP, I found another one
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.
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.
Either give it a rest or take that shit back to .ml where it’s tolerated.
Reddit will ban anything and everything except right wing bullshit.
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
“open dialogue”? I’m gonna have to assume you mean some instances will censor you for criticizing Russia, because the right-wing translation of “free speech” is “when my speech is free and yours isn’t”.
See also: “free speech absolutist” Elon Musk.
not true one bit, its the opposite now. it leans heavily right wing on most subs now, it just bans and or removes most criticism against right wing sources. update your info being commenting.
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.
How do you tell they’re Russian bots and not American right wing bots?
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.
I’ve had success with the “not interested in channel” button
Yeah I have to heavily curate my YouTube but if you do it’s still full of really great stuff. I also have to keep myself on top of it, it’s easy to let yourself slip into trash content now and then.
The comments are pretty universally bad though, even on the good content.
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 first noticed Russian bots yahoo news comment section…
It was wierdest shot ever than it became mainstream and a lot more sophisticated
How do you tell that they are Russian?
Russian propaganda talking points although nowadays half of america is doing the same and rjeu are deff not bots or paid shills. Just useful idiots.
Back then it was not like that
What? Did you reply to the wrong comment?
How do you tell that they are Russian?
Yeah, your comment wasn’t a reply to that.
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.
It’s surprising that no other country uses troll farms…
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.
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 just replied to one not a half hour ago!
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.
I’m guessing they meant this https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heebie-jeebies
Correct. US southern English.
You have this phrase all up the East coast into Canada fyi
If it goes that far, it’s probably all over the US.
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.
deleted by creator
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.
They are, people here just aren’t capable of imagining anyone to the left of Elizabeth Warren
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…
