this post was submitted on 18 Mar 2025
238 points (98.8% liked)

Reddit

19819 readers
2133 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
 

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.

top 50 comments
sorted by: hot top controversial new old
[–] doodledup@lemmy.world 104 points 21 hours ago (4 children)

No. I'm using Lemmy.

Besides that, who cares. I'm using Lemmy.

[–] aubeynarf@lemmynsfw.com 47 points 20 hours ago (2 children)

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.

[–] Machinist@lemmy.world 10 points 19 hours ago (1 children)

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.

[–] TheOctonaut@mander.xyz 4 points 15 hours ago (3 children)
[–] Kbobabob@lemmy.world 13 points 11 hours ago (1 children)
[–] Machinist@lemmy.world 5 points 9 hours ago (1 children)

Correct. US southern English.

[–] bane_killgrind@slrpnk.net 3 points 9 hours ago (1 children)

You have this phrase all up the East coast into Canada fyi

[–] Machinist@lemmy.world 3 points 9 hours ago (1 children)

If it goes that far, it's probably all over the US.

[–] TheOctonaut@mander.xyz 2 points 6 hours ago (1 children)

I'm familiar and I'm from Ireland. But abbreviating it to "heebs" is new.

load more comments (1 replies)
[–] Machinist@lemmy.world 3 points 9 hours ago

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.

load more comments (1 replies)
[–] bane_killgrind@slrpnk.net 3 points 9 hours ago

I just replied to one not a half hour ago!

[–] Stache_@lemmy.ml 9 points 18 hours ago (1 children)

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

[–] Ledericas@lemm.ee 9 points 14 hours ago (1 children)

i see alot of conservative ones pop up, and any lemmy.ml post is also disengenious and leans heavily to the right.

[–] lazynooblet@lazysoci.al 2 points 12 hours ago (1 children)

I'm confused. I thought .ml were left, like far far extreme left.

[–] 9bananas@lemmy.world 5 points 9 hours ago

tankies are left in exactly the same way North Korea is democratic

[–] SkavarSharraddas@gehirneimer.de 5 points 20 hours ago

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).

load more comments (1 replies)
[–] Xanthobilly@lemmy.world 83 points 20 hours ago (2 children)

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.

[–] Ledericas@lemm.ee 11 points 14 hours ago

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)

[–] El_Scapacabra@lemm.ee 7 points 12 hours ago

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.

[–] SoftestSapphic@lemmy.world 46 points 17 hours ago (1 children)

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.

[–] AcidicBasicGlitch@lemm.ee 1 points 8 hours ago

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.

[–] FauxLiving@lemmy.world 34 points 9 hours ago (2 children)

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.

[–] sunzu2@thebrainbin.org 13 points 8 hours ago (2 children)

And yet as short staffed as they are, these mods always manage to suppress pro Luigi and anti musk content

[–] FauxLiving@lemmy.world 6 points 7 hours ago

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

[–] goferking0@lemmy.sdf.org 3 points 7 hours ago

Easier when admins do it for them

[–] ArchmageAzor@lemmy.world 4 points 5 hours ago (1 children)

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.

[–] FauxLiving@lemmy.world 3 points 4 hours ago

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.

[–] Darkcoffee@sh.itjust.works 32 points 21 hours ago (2 children)

Canadian elections coming up, shareholders of Reddit probably have a stake in conservative politics... Yeah, current social media is gross.

[–] InvertedParallax@lemm.ee 5 points 14 hours ago

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.

[–] RandomVideos@programming.dev 2 points 12 hours ago

The Romanian election too

[–] Gonzako@lemmy.world 27 points 15 hours ago

When you ban sensible discussion you're left with utter nonsense

[–] fakeplastic@lemmy.dbzer0.com 20 points 20 hours ago

Still being on Reddit in 2025 has turned into a real leopards eating my face situation.

[–] Ledericas@lemm.ee 19 points 14 hours ago

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.

[–] jewbacca117@lemmy.world 18 points 20 hours ago

Haven't been on reddit in a while, so, no I haven't noticed.

[–] skozzii@lemmy.ca 16 points 7 hours ago

Reddit will ban anything and everything except right wing bullshit.

[–] Crashumbc@lemmy.world 14 points 5 hours ago

If by recent you mean 5-6 years then yes

[–] rabber@lemmy.ca 13 points 7 hours ago (1 children)

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.

load more comments (1 replies)
[–] vxx@lemmy.world 11 points 5 hours ago

Reddit has been protecting russian bot farms for almost a decade now.

[–] DistressedDad@lemmy.ca 9 points 20 hours ago

I’ve noticed ‘the algorithm’ pushing Russian content through Instagram and Facebook reels. Seemingly unrelated to what I usually browse.

[–] AcidicBasicGlitch@lemm.ee 9 points 8 hours ago

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.

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.

[–] Mr_Wolf@lemm.ee 8 points 10 hours ago

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/

[–] awake01@lemmy.world 8 points 19 hours ago

Also on YouTube

[–] ugtug@lemm.ee 5 points 8 hours ago (4 children)

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.

load more comments (4 replies)
[–] arotrios@lemmy.world 5 points 19 hours ago

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.

[–] JazzlikeDiamond558@lemm.ee 5 points 7 hours ago

Have you visited ''Ukraine'' on lemmy? No need to go to reddit.

I had to leave about a year ago because of this.

[–] Shaper@lemm.ee 2 points 19 hours ago

Of course, cause all the cool kids moved to Lemmy. They are the only ones left over there.

[–] Kaboom@reddthat.com 2 points 19 hours ago

No? If anything it's chugging along like normal.

load more comments
view more: next ›