How do you tell the difference between Russian propaganda and right wing American propaganda?
this post was submitted on 18 Mar 2025
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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.
If by recent you mean 5-6 years then yes
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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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.
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When you ban sensible discussion you're left with utter nonsense
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.
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)
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Have you visited ''Ukraine'' on lemmy? No need to go to reddit.
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.
I had to leave about a year ago because of this.
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/
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