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.
When you ban sensible discussion you’re left with utter nonsense
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
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.
No. Im just a leftist. I’m used to knowing things too early. You’ll catch up eventually, and then pretend you knew the truth the whole time. I know how this goes.
A leftist ranting about the evils of USAID.
lmao, okay sweetie. That’s nice. 😂
The acronym is an intentional misnomer to mislead people about their mission, and they’ve spent a lot of money to craft their image. It’s understandable to mistakenly believe it’s focused on aid.
Peddle your BS to someone more gullible.
Either give it a rest or take that shit back to .ml where it’s tolerated.
Lol “the truth”
You believe these media companies were not taking money from USAID?
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.
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.
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)
I’m just seeing a lot of sanitation of reddit. Must be making it advertiser friendly or kissing up to the admin.
If by recent you mean 5-6 years then yes
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’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. 🤭
Also on YouTube
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.
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.
Ahhhhhhhh good tips thanks
sometimes they also use buzzwords too, like saying both sides, and or use it in 3rd person.
Ah good tips
Also only happens before elections and in communities with a lot of users. They don’t go in to small and moderately sized groups geared toward specific topics.
It’s honestly frightening. If that’s what we know about God knows what else is influencing us and we don’t know they’re doing it
How do you determine that something is Russian propaganda specifically?
It’s usually not subtle, and are almost always outright lies. Statements along the lines of ‘Ukraine is infested with Nazis, so invasion was justified’, ‘The threat of Ukraine joining NATO caused the war’, ‘Russia is the new Rome’, etc.
How do you tell that they’re Russian bot and assets, and not American or indian or any other country?
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?
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.
deleted by creator
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.
Still being on Reddit in 2025 has turned into a real leopards eating my face situation.
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…
