Is anyone else noticing an uptick in far-right content and Russian propaganda on reddit lately?
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. 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 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.
I just replied to one not a half hour 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
i see alot of conservative ones pop up, and any lemmy.ml post is also disengenious and leans heavily to the right.
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...
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.
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.
And yet as short staffed as they are, these mods always manage to suppress pro Luigi and anti musk content
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
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.
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.
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.
questioning any reddit habits will get removed, if your not a mod yourself.
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.
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
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.
How do you tell the difference between Russian propaganda and right wing American propaganda?
It is such an extreme dysfunctional problem. The right would hate immigrants, sexual/reproductive freedom without Russian interference. If some disinformation is sourced from Russia, GOP fully supporting it is a GOP blamed act. Equivalent to them paying cheaper Russian bot farms for GOP purposes.
The complete acceptance of Russophobia propaganda around here, and the economic damage from supporting a losing war on Russia, was a factor in losing a close election, though GOP vote rigging and voter suppression, and an Israel first DNC that supports Trump, was a bigger factor. The economic damage of a losing war based on propaganda disinformation, meant that Biden could not criticize the war as defense for inflation policies.
War on Russia will never make you happy. For all I know, midterms democrat strategy will be based on resuming war on Russia. The demonization of peace because "peace means Putin wins", and so peace means being a servant of Putin, is both so simplistic but so effective in causing deranged views.
Yeah, as far as I can tell, American Democrats have just created there own version of secular Christianity, where there's just ontologically a single source of all evil on Earth and that's Putin. It basically means that domestic fascism is basically given a free parse, and leaves liberals trying to prevent the slide into fascism with ultranationalism, xenophobia, militancy and McCarthiest paranoia, which doesn't work for obvious reasons.
War on Russia will never make you happy.
Seeing the Russians run headlong into the Ukrainian meat grinder makes me very happy lol
Seeing a UA drone drop a grenade on a Russian soldier that was busy giving another Russian soldier a blowjob instead of keeping watch...that shit made my week
Russia losing naval battles against a country with no navy
That giant tank convoy that just kinda...got stuck. And then blew up.
Oh oh oh and when Pringles almost did a coup, that shit made my MONTH
No, I haven't. Because I no longer go on Reddit.
This is the way.
When you ban sensible discussion you're left with utter nonsense
Still being on Reddit in 2025 has turned into a real leopards eating my face situation.
Reddit will ban anything and everything except right wing bullshit.
Probably because it is the only content allowed now.
I'm astonished how quickly Reddit has rotted in the one year I quit.
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)
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.
If by recent you mean 5-6 years then yes
Maybe also has something to do with the uptick of banning left leaning people talking about the damage Trump and Musk are doing? There have been a TON of people here saying their 10+ year old accounts have been banned.
yes i had several of my 5+ get a sitewide banned, but it only gave the "multiple violations of several accounts, but not the actual incident of the ban itself" you can assume its ban evasion, but they dint ban you for that, just a very vague AI message and ban. even if you did ban evade you usually get a message of "the previous account you are attempting to evade on this account". also i believe vaguness is intentional so it gives reddit legitamcy.
ALso what triggered all those ban for many people, at least for my i believe when i was temp banned from r/technology for report abused i got an instant ban on all my throwaways and old accts, plus a backup main account i created last year.
Haven't been on reddit in a while, so, no I haven't noticed.
Fuck Reddit. Lemmy is worlds better outside of missing a few niche communities
Let’s make some lemmy servers for those niche communities then
Lately?
My sentiments exactly. Been an increasing problem over there since 2016 that I noticed but I'm sure there was this bullshittery there before and I just wasn't in the subreddits where it festered.
I don’t know about Reddit as a whole but the subreddit for my country has not only been flooded with far right content, there has been a hostile takeover of the mod team. All of the sensible and balanced mods were forced out and replaced by fascist lunatics.
The r/Unitedkingdom subreddit seems to be in the process of being taken over. Constant posts about crimes that brown immigrants commit with the same type of comments. It seems like one half of the sub notice and keep calling it out but another cohort keep posting and commenting anti immigration rhetoric. Said posts get upvoted very quickly too.
It's a stark contrast to how it was 5 or 10 years ago.
same in the west coast, hint hint, 2 of the subs have been replaced by conservatives, or good two shoe shills. thier defending things like jury duty and fare citations.
They're getting a lot of pressure from the Trump administration to clamp down on leftist content and ease regulations on right wing stuff
Yeah, I don't think it's an uptick of Russians and right wingers so much as a downtick in sane and leftist comments.
yup, also significant astroturfing from right wing shills.
this is one part, but i think its mostly because of ad revenue, right wing content drives traffic to the site, it works for Youtube/facebook.
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 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"
How do you tell that they are Russian?
I don't buy the whole Russia thing because it takes the burden of guilt off of the admin and makes them look like pawns. No, the admin would be this way regardless of Russia. The Russia connection is a symptom of MAGA, not the cause.
This is naive. Russia has been waging psychological warfare on us for literally decades. They are open about this. They've written books about it. It is LITERALLY Russian military doctrine.
I am NOT advocating for marching on Moscow. But to ignore the psychological warfare that was amplified by, yes willing conspirators which does indicate we DO have a root problem here too, is to ignore the circumstances that brought us here.
We are only here because of the combination of old-school crazies in the Heritage Foundation controlling Fox News/trad. media and our 4chan billionaires pushing all sorts of propaganda from the depths of the internet & 4chan, which is pretty much all Russian/chinese/iranian propaganda aimed at destabilizing trust within the west.
Sure people are stupid and like conspiracies --- but the conspiracy sphere is EXACTLY a target of Russian propaganda because the user base already distrusts the government and they're a user base that's willing to push their beliefs onto others if you can convince them.... see QANON. Qanon has deep ties to both Russia AND to the tech bros, namely Thiel and Musk.
This is only possible because of the MARRIAGE OF THESE IDEAS. They are equally to blame. We are at war with Russia as much as we are at war with our own traitorous billionaires.
russian troll farm has been on reddit for years, since trumps 1st term. you can tell which comments are russian trolls, by the way its posted.
Rather than an uptick of far-right, more like a downtick of genuine sensible people in contrast to them.
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...
I'm one week reddit free after 2 bans. I honestly don't miss it. Recently it's been all right-wing propaganda and conspiracies, getting banned for innocuous things, and general hate towards other users. That platform is dying fast. Here's to Lemmy supremacy! 🥂
“Ignorance is bliss, Rick, when ‘tis folly to be wise.”
Couldn’t help myself. 🤭
No longer on Reddit. That’s why I’m here. Kept getting banned because, “who knows”?
"Why am I banned?"
silence
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.
Yeah, when I've visited there has been very small amounts of far right posts, maybe because of the algo?
i believe its what the MSMs, did sanewashing his every move, so he looks more legitamcy and bolsters his support.
its not because of the anti-trump posts, but its most the fact that resemble what MSMs has been doing, reporting everything trump does give him free press and legitimacy to the gop. additionally alot of comments get removed in those same posts for very little reason too. and also adding as adistraction from the actual things they couldve been posting. its called sanewashing. also some posters have been traced back to right wing bots and trolls too. too add, subs you never thought would see on the fornt page, such as conservative have become a constant prescence, also ragebaiting posts too.
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.
thats because the mods are right wingers themselves or in cahoots with reddit admins. at least 92 mods control 500+subs, and you can guess where they have thier hands in. these power/supermods, are probably right wing themselves and speak with reddit admins on the regular.
WTF is Reddit?
Seriously though get off that site, it's not good for you.
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.
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/
Also on YouTube
I’ve noticed ‘the algorithm’ pushing Russian content through Instagram and Facebook reels. Seemingly unrelated to what I usually browse.
How do you determine if content is "Russian"
youtube does that to. usually in the form of antiwoke shorts, and foxnews, right wing grifter videos "gotcha left" moments.
I'm just seeing a lot of sanitation of reddit. Must be making it advertiser friendly or kissing up to the admin.
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.
I had to leave about a year ago because of this.
It's everywhere. I'm guessing they have a lot extra free money to spend on propaganda now that they allies with the US.
Have you visited ''Ukraine'' on lemmy? No need to go to reddit.
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.
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.
How do you tell that they're Russian bot and assets, and not American or indian or any other country?
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.
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.
How did you determine that?
Who’s on Reddit?
Apparently far-right and russian people/bots.
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.
An uptick? Nah, it's always been that way.
Of course, cause all the cool kids moved to Lemmy. They are the only ones left over there.
No? If anything it's chugging along like normal.
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
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.
"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.
I don't know, I just have never really experienced censorship when criticizing anything on the right wing. Perhaps my issues with reddit is not the content itself as much as it is the moderators and their attempts to suppress open dialogue - we may be on the same wave length and agreement in regards to allowing criticism openly, I just think you should also consider that it's not just happening on critics against "the right wing".
If you don't like left-bias, you're going to hate it here. Lemmy is literally created by communists.
https://github.com/LemmyNet : owned by Dessalines, Nutomic and SleeplessOne1917
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/
Hey OP, I found another one
Lol "the truth"
You believe these media companies were not taking money from USAID?
Either give it a rest or take that shit back to .ml where it’s tolerated.