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.
this post was submitted on 18 Mar 2025
301 points (97.8% liked)
19863 readers
1344 users here now
News and Discussions about Reddit
Welcome to !reddit. This is a community for all news and discussions about Reddit.
The rules for posting and commenting, besides the rules defined here for lemmy.world, are as follows:
Rules
Rule 1- No brigading.
**You may not encourage brigading any communities or subreddits in any way. **
YSKs are about self-improvement on how to do things.
Rule 2- No illegal or NSFW or gore content.
**No illegal or NSFW or gore content. **
Rule 3- Do not seek mental, medical and professional help here.
Do not seek mental, medical and professional help here. Breaking this rule will not get you or your post removed, but it will put you at risk, and possibly in danger.
Rule 4- No self promotion or upvote-farming of any kind.
That's it.
Rule 5- No baiting or sealioning or promoting an agenda.
Posts and comments which, instead of being of an innocuous nature, are specifically intended (based on reports and in the opinion of our crack moderation team) to bait users into ideological wars on charged political topics will be removed and the authors warned - or banned - depending on severity.
Rule 6- Regarding META posts.
Provided it is about the community itself, you may post non-Reddit posts using the [META] tag on your post title.
Rule 7- You can't harass or disturb other members.
If you vocally harass or discriminate against any individual member, you will be removed.
Likewise, if you are a member, sympathiser or a resemblant of a movement that is known to largely hate, mock, discriminate against, and/or want to take lives of a group of people, and you were provably vocal about your hate, then you will be banned on sight.
Rule 8- All comments should try to stay relevant to their parent content.
Rule 9- Reposts from other platforms are not allowed.
Let everyone have their own content.
Rule 10- Majority of bots aren't allowed to participate here. This includes using AI responses and summaries.
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
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.
load more comments
(1 replies)
load more comments
(1 replies)
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.
load more comments
(2 replies)
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.
I'm familiar and I'm from Ireland. But abbreviating it to "heebs" is new.
Neat. I think it goes back at least to the '90s. It's a great descriptive word. I really hope it doesn't get picked up by the wrong sorts. They already stole my yellow snake flag.
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.
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
load more comments
(1 replies)
load more comments
(2 replies)
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)
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.
When you ban sensible discussion you're left with utter nonsense
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.
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/
I had to leave about a year ago because of this.
Canadian elections coming up, shareholders of Reddit probably have a stake in conservative politics... Yeah, current social media is gross.
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.
The Romanian election too
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.
load more comments
(1 replies)
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.
load more comments
(6 replies)
load more comments
(1 replies)
Still being on Reddit in 2025 has turned into a real leopards eating my face situation.
Haven't been on reddit in a while, so, no I haven't noticed.
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
I’ve noticed ‘the algorithm’ pushing Russian content through Instagram and Facebook reels. Seemingly unrelated to what I usually browse.
youtube does that to. usually in the form of antiwoke shorts, and foxnews, right wing grifter videos "gotcha left" moments.
load more comments
(1 replies)
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.