Historically, I’ve perceived Reddit as slightly left leaning, with strong pockets of conservatives. Recently though, a vast majority of comment sections seem to excuse violence, such as in this thread (TW: police brutality), where people say things like
TW: Supporting violence
The students didn’t hurt the bullets, right?
They paid to learn so… You go learn today
Um…good?
And I’m seriously wondering when Reddit got so bad that the hivemind supports calls for violence. Are these humans? Are they bots? Why does reddit allow this conduct?
It has been for a long time. Reddit has never been left leaning it any meaningful sense of the word. That’s literally just a thing people said without evidence.
Redditors have always been, by and large, a majority misogynist, homophobic, anti-lgbt, pro-violence etc.
The mods of most major subs reflect that as well.
Conservatives have a lot to gain by building bots to antagonize and convert naive young (and old) people by plastering their dumb ideas everywhere. It’s marketing, if you’re cruel and dumb they want you on their team.
Conservatives have a lot to gain by building bots to antagonize and convert naive young (and old) people by plastering their dumb ideas everywhere. It’s marketing, if you’re cruel and dumb they want you on their team.
Because their opinions are unpopular as fuck, even amongst their own base, so they have to resort to paying propagandists and social manipulators to spam accounts and posts about their shit to make it seem more popular than it is, in the hopes of converting some of their idiot base by making them go “WELL SO MANY PEOPLE (BOTS) ARE TALKING ABOUT THIS, IT MUST BE POPULAR, THERE FOR I MUST LIKE IT OR I FAIL CONSERVATISM”
A surprising amount of people want to watch the world burn, as long as they can do it from a balcony.
I do believe I’m going to borrow this one.
A surprising amount of people want to watch the world burn, as long as they can do it from a balcony.
“I never thought the
leopards would eat my facefire would spread to my building!”Exactly, my theory is they are too narcissistic to realize that fire will spread to their metaphorical balcony… idk. My own theory seems dumb to me, how could they be so shortsighted?
My own theory seems dumb to me, how could they be so shortsighted?
There are countless events in human history where that question could be asked. Thinking long-term about the health of the environment and the species just doesn’t seem to be within human capability.
It’s also so, so, sooooooo easy to post right wing bullshit because it’s always emotional shallow and without any nuance.
So if you say immigrants are stealing all our jobs and committing crimes all over our country! People are already getting riled up, while I have to spend 5 minutes explaining that while we have to secure our borders immigrants aren’t the cause of all our woes.
And while I’m in the middle of my 5 minute explanation debunking your first horseshit point, you interject “Gays are over running our schools and molesting our kids!”…
So yea… The truth has a huge disadvantage in the online space because it’s so easy to spread lies.
The bullshit asymmetry principle.
It takes far more text to disprove bullshit than spout the bullshit itself.
Then, to prevent your followers from reading the debunking, introduce, “Lol libs sure do write a lot, they do that because they are dumb and triggered!”
And, “I love the poorly educated” (because they haven’t been taught how to apply reason to arguments so they can’t see through my historically well-known hate tactics because they don’t read books.)
But they do understand, “Sleepy Joe!” “Crooked Hillary!”
So yeah, you’re encountering bullshit asymmetry, it sucks and our job is hard, but hey, since we are on the topic of slogans, let me paraphrase a famous one. “We do this thing or that thing not because it is easy, but because it is hard.”
The decision you always have is knowing when to fight and when to walk away from someone who isn’t ready to listen.
We all left. Who are the people that stayed behind?
Also bots.
Yeah, last time I went back to survey the landscape the more anticorporate/progressive subs I knew were noticeably diminished, while subs that get off on the futility of activism and immutability of power structures were going strong.
I straight up see top comments calling for the death of all black people on front page subs lmao
So sooo many bots now
The last natural, human, popular subreddit to arise on reddit was r/antiwork
After that, the site got swarmed by bots and censorship.
If you try and post something even remotely progressive in a popular subreddit, it will get deleted and you will probably get banned.
It’s flooded with bots as well as karma farmers. You can tell by the way they write down their comments.
For better or for worse, you’ll often find real people at the reddit comments when sorting by controversial. Often for the worse, but sometimes for the better.
Fascism’s quite profitable until they start rounding people up.
And even then, it’s profitable for the “right” sort of people… :-P
Helping keep track of who to round up was very profitable for IBM, and it was for Facebook in Myanmar.
I left reddit for good 4 years ago for just this reason. I suspect it was well before that, like when someone tracked the IPS of reddit users and discovered that the most redditors were in the town where Eglin Air Force base is located. Now there’s more bots but they used to have more people just doing the same shit. Lots of large police forces have big social media teams I wonder what they do. And the most prolific mod and poster of their time was likely Ghislaine Maxwell. Oh and their CEO made their career in the CIA before coming over to Reddit, which from what we know about people who left the CIA to go into media, is that they never really left
Interesting hypothesis, would you mind citing some sources for those claims? I never heard of spez being CIA or any of the other rather huge claims you make.
*Sorry its been forever since I looked at these notes. It isn’t the CEO its the Director of Policy, Jessica Ashooh. Thanks for the spot check
https://off-guardian.org/2019/12/09/reddit-hiring-nato-shills-to-control-narrative/
I agree these claims are a little crazy, but not actually that crazy. Did a little digging and
that the most redditors were in the town where Eglin Air Force base is located
- Reddit claims this themself (now deleted): https://web.archive.org/web/20160604042751/http://www.redditblog.com/2013/05/get-ready-for-global-reddit-meetup-day.html
- Airforce study on social media manipulation: https://arxiv.org/pdf/1402.5644
Ghislaine Maxwell
their CEO made their career in the CIA before coming over to Reddit
No fucking clue on this one
Sorry I hadn’t looked at my notes or thought about this in a while. Its not the CEO its their director of Policy, Jessica Ashooh. My apologies to Spez I hope his mountains of money can give him comfort.
That air force study is cool, gonna add it to my notes!
Everywhere is shit. Lemmy has those folks too
Probably just your average Russian Trolls/AI bots. May I suggest simply just not subscibing or browsing political/news subreddits/communities? You’re ragebaiting yourself for no reason. Just ignore those areas of the Internet. Your mental health will thank you.
Yup, I’ve seen enough posts where bots are clearly reposting (huge) comment chains from older posts to know the place is absolutely crawling with them
Subreddit Simulator wasn’t an experiment, it was a proof-of-concept.
This is the sure-fire solution. Before I left Reddit when the API bs went down (RIP RIF), I had already filtered out all the popular and simipopular political and adjacent subs. It change my Reddit experience and overall frustration levels immediately and all for the better. I still got the news I wanted here and there but without that dumbass antagonistic shithole that’s the comments section. Anyway, good riddance, Reddit.
Lemmy has the same doomscrolling ragebait political bullshit though. So make sure to hide those here too.
Reddit admins straight up love Nazis. That’s not hyperbole. It’s a long and recorded history.
Link to the records?
Source: trust me bro
This shit is spreading everywhere, even to non-US subreddits. I regularly saw anti-muslim, homophobic comments on supposedly non-political subreddits like /r/indianboysontinder.
Even self-proclaimed feminist subreddit like TwoXIndia has their members posting BJP talking points when duscussion turn to politics
I mean tbf Islamophobia on an Indian subreddit isn’t surprising.
It used to be limited to right wing subreddits but now its everywhere
Spez is a fascist, dude allowed nazi propaganda on his platform in the name of “free speech”. Users are disgusted by what’s on r/popular so the nazi population percentage grows. Add to this the complete eradication of mod tools and you get bots and extremists invasions.
Imo, community-wise, reddit is on track to become another 9gag. Which is to say, a crypto fascist cesspool.
Yeah, I’m still active in the formula1 and NBA subs because politics there is practically banned. There was some drama lately because trump said it’s his merit if Lando Norris won the Miami Gran Prix…
If it wasn’t for reddit supporting /r/TheDonald, there is a good chance MAGA might not have ever happened, at least not in the way it manifested.
Trump was able to get a significance amount of grassroots support early on, and it almost all came from /r/TheDonald. This was before anything was really happening on other social media. People that were disenfranchised with Obama pretty much went with either Bernie or Trump. It was a warzone on Reddit. Both Bernie and Trump did AMA’s and this blew them up popularity wise.
What Bernie didn’t have that Trump did was an army of russian bots supporting him.
idk, I disagree that /r/TheDonald’s existence was what sparked MAGA. Russia had such a heavy hand in the creation and support of MAGA that they would have found another place to start the fire. TheDonald was just the largest pile of kindle available… with many more around it. I could imagine they would have focused even harder on facebook, or news coverage or whatever else.
Regardless, I do agree with the rest of your point that TheDonald had a huge influence on MAGA
Nah, if you want to point at the thing that made all this happen…then its not MAGA.
it was Gamergate.
Gamergate was the prototype and test run for the foreign provocateurs, right wing extremists and other hate mongers to see how successful such a large scale attempt at manipulation of narratives and communities could be… and it proved quite successful, and the same tactics and methods were scaled up even further to lay the groundwork for Trumpism and what we have today.
Gamergate was the Trinity test that lead to Littleboy (general uptick in rightwing extremism/fascism and approval of such) and FatMan (Russian “Useful Idiots” who came to power, or threatened to, with Russian backing, not just in America, but elsewhere)
I was so confused by gamergate.
you are very into something but the whole thing was so just, incoherent. Like I still don’t really get what gamergate was because it was like a Russian nesting doll of gaslighting.
It’s taken me years and reading the explanations a dozen times to figure out what anyone involved even thought it was about.
it was a test run that was more successful than the puppet masters ever anticipated, Which is why the only real coherent message out of it was the right wings downright contempt for women.
and those same tactics, and hell, even topics, are still being used today with Trumpism, Right Wing Extremism, and the Russian Puppets push for fascism in western countries.
It was whatever you wanted it to be. I had one friend who bought the line that it was about “ethics in journalism” (imagine me doing a concussive eye roll here). He was on the redpill path at the time (luckily pulled back from the edge since). Anyway, I think the melange of ideologies to sample from gamer gate were appealing to people who felt victimised by society, but didn’t want to acknowledge their role in their victimisation, let alone how capitalism/fascism/patriarchy actively hurt them and retarded their aims (aimless though these types tend to be).
It’s classic cruel optimism.
I think the melange of ideologies to sample from gamer gate were appealing to people who felt victimised by society, but didn’t want to acknowledge their role in their victimization, let alone how capitalism/fascism/patriarchy actively hurt them and retarded their aims (aimless though these types tend to be).
Great way of framing it. I just stayed very clear of the whole thing because I couldn’t even identify coherent ‘sides’ at the time.
Wasn’t Steve Bannon involved in that too. Mr get paid by fascist government to travel around the US and after the 2016 election he traveled around Europe to spread the fascist seeds.
This should be the paragraph in text books.
In hindsight it was pretty fucking obvious when TD was regularly inspiring terrorist attacks and was allowed to thrive while CTH got banned for saying 17th century slave owners deserve death
…with strong pockets of conservatives.
Being loud, disrespectful and obnoxious is frequently an attempt to mask weakness and insecurity.
I get what you mean, though. I avoid that cesspool as much as possible.
I think you have AI to thank. Bots are going to take over everything, and I worry that soon comments of anything on the Internet will be rife with garbage like this.
Internet solipsism; you realize you’re the only real person on the internet
Edit: solipsism probably isn’t the right word, i think i heard a word for this but can’t recall what it was
Dead internet theory
It didn’t. Lemmy is ultra liberal so Reddit appears fascist.
Idk, the subs I used to frequent the most have definitely shifted to the right.
Worldnews over there is just a horrendous shitpile of fascism and Hasbara. It used to be way more variable depending on time of day and stuff.
Same as it ever was, only now events have changed. There never was a massive exodus from Reddit, so the opinions you see there are a better representation of the masses than the limited ones you read here.
At most a few hundred people will vote on a post like this. That’s all you really need to know.
Nope, the Israel Palestine occupation has been a thing for decades. Redfit was different in, say, 2014 (another hostage situation) to what it is now.
Personally I think it has a lot to do with the total unleashing of bots and astroturfers, but it’s definitely noticeable to me.
Yeah, I don’t support most of the crackdowns on the protests, but it’s silly to think that people are suddenly fascist for wanting state power to crack down on what they BELIEVE is antisemitism. If I believed that the protesters were doing it more out of weird racist shit than concern for Palestinians, I would want them out too. ESPECIALLY now.
And before you say “well they should know better!” I mean sure, but not everyone has the luxury of spending tons of time analyzing every single piece of news, looking into multiple sources, reading the history of a middle east region the size of New Jersey, etc, etc. What makes it even harder is that Israel and Palestine are ultimately foreign countries, no matter how much of an alliance the U.S has with Isreal, it’s still a country in the middle East.
Then there is the nuance, Hamas are still terrorists and Netanyahu even supported them until October 7th, Israelies were trying to actively get red of the guy until the 7th, the country was set up by the British have both sides fight and hate eachother forever, real antisemitism is rising all over the world and fascists are trying to take advantage of that and connect it to Israel-Palestine. Then Add media bias and how even video footage can be fake with AI and you have a basically completely out of control situation.
Eh the brits were just following the example the Ottoman Empire set.
Source? I’ll admit I’m very new to Israel-Palestine, that’s why I keep quiet about it most of the time, but I felt like speaking up for other people who know even less about the issue would be a good idea here on Lemmy where people seem to have a great deal of knowledge on the subject.
Its not specific to Palestine as it was due to how the Ottoman empire typically left the existing adminstration structures in place when they conquered regions.
Then, many of its sultans used rival groups against each other, typically to their own benefit as both groups jockied for power over the other.
Also, notably, non-muslims(and non-male muslims) were explicitly inferior citizens in the eyes of Ottoman law. They(example: christians and jews) were allowed to make their own communities, but they weren’t seen as equals.
Source: the Ottoman Empire by Kenneth W Harl as well as https://www.britannica.com/place/Ottoman-Empire
Reddit still trends liberal overall, but anti-police sentiment has been on a decline for awhile. To me, it feels like the anti-establishment crowd basically died out completely over the pandemic. Reddit also tends to trend anti-hamas and pro-israel, the newer users don’t really understand that you can be against both so if it hurts the one they don’t like, it has to be good.
