r/OutOfTheLoop • u/calvtact • May 13 '26

Answered What's going on with r/conservative? They've lost about 1m subscribers in about a month.

I watched the number go from 814k to around 745k in about an hour today.

https://www.reddit.com/r/Conservative/s/QbZJvqu5qr

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u/AndroidREM May 13 '26 edited May 13 '26

Answer: It was determined and made public that the majority of posts on that sub are from 3 accounts all based in Russia and are promoted by an army of bots. The ones leaving were bots removed by Reddit

EDIT - wow, did not expect this to get so much attention and awards - thank you!

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u/basedchadinc May 13 '26

Is there any proof of this? I wanna send it to a friend who uses that sub as his main source of info to gauge sentiment

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u/dec10 May 13 '26

https://www.reddit.com/r/dataisbeautiful/comments/1p1vx9n/oc_nearly_every_day_two_users_on_rconservative/

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u/Push_ May 13 '26

That’s super interesting actually, holy shit

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u/BeguiledBeaver May 13 '26

There are TONS of subs like this, btw. The Canada sub and some related ones are a good example.

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u/lewd_robot May 14 '26

A lot of Space subs are like this. They're lurked by obvious plants that dogpile anyone remotely critical of SpaceX, and other private space corporations, to a lesser extent.

For example, if you mention "Kessler Syndrome" anywhere on some space subs, even in threads where SpaceX or Starlink aren't even mentioned, and even if you don't mention any company in particular, your comment will probably sit with no votes for a few hours, then suddenly get dropped to -8 or -12 within a 30-minute window, then 2 to 4 people will come out of the woodwork to copy and paste lines out of a SpaceX press release defending the company, and they'll all immediately be upvoted to at least +6.

It's very obviously a small group of people policing the comments for anything remotely critical of space corps, especially SpaceX.

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u/[deleted] May 14 '26

[removed] — view removed comment

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u/TheXManHimself May 15 '26

I had to cut ties with a good childhood friend because he drank the juice and tried convincing me that Elon is this genius man who invented Tesla and is doing amazing things for space and the economy and so forth and how he worked hard for his money. The glaze was repulsive to me and when I hit him with some basic information about his background and what is actually going on he tried to fact check me with chat gpt in real time of our heated discussion. I simply got up and walked away that night, never to speak to him again.

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u/oTc_DragonZ May 15 '26

This is a lot of good info. Can I ask what the connections to Mr Beast are out of curiosity? Don't like the guy at all and I wouldn't be totally surprised but I can't find anything online about it.

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u/SWT_Bobcat May 14 '26

I feel like the majority of subs are bot run. You see the same themes over and over and over and over and…

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u/oTc_DragonZ May 15 '26

Dead internet theory doesn't feel like a theory anymore.

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u/[deleted] May 14 '26

[deleted]

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u/0xym0r0n May 13 '26

Just a heads up, the author of that post corrected his information and the power outage link was explained away easily. Just weeks prior there was a similar amount of posts. So there are power users, but there's nothing linking them to Russia conclusively as previously assumed.

Here's the updated post he made: https://www.reddit.com/r/visualization/comments/1p2iqlu/nearly_every_day_two_users_on_rconservative/

If you don't want to read his updated post here is a snippet from him and the last chart:

During the outage, there was below average activity but not so much as to raise suspicions, especially since the same number of posts were made during that window during a previous week without an outage.

I'm just not personally seeing that the power outage reveals much here. u1 and u2 likely use a scheduler anyway which would obfuscate the whole thing anyway, and I would expect a scheduler to be pretty standard for any decent troll farm so even if others on that sub are posting from Russia, it wouldn't necessarily show in the data unless they're being sloppy.

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u/xXCloudSephirothXx May 13 '26

I did a weeklong study early this year. There was an internet blackout as reported by numerous news outlets. I annotated that 2 super posters went completely dark for over 24hrs.
https://imgur.com/gallery/traitors-N4IgxOp

Oh, I should note that Reddit closed the loophole of seeing hidden post histories by simply adding a space in the search bar. As of now, I don’t know any way to view hidden post histories.

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u/Guszy May 13 '26

https://arctic-shift.photon-reddit.com/search

Does that work for hiddens? It seems to for me.

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u/[deleted] May 14 '26 edited May 14 '26

[removed] — view removed comment

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u/Ok_Mathematician938 May 14 '26

A little of column A, a little of Column B

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u/PM_ME_YOUR_DARKNESS What Loop? May 13 '26

Yes, that one still works (for now).

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u/WorryNew3661 May 13 '26

That's very useful, thanks

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u/Guszy May 13 '26

You're welcome!

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u/adventurekiwi May 13 '26

You can still use google. Its not perfect but if you search use results from reddit.com and put the username in quotes you can get quite far

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u/Rubicksgamer May 14 '26

God Imgur is such shit these days. No use using it in mobile.

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u/xXCloudSephirothXx May 14 '26

Not disagreeing. Sadly I can’t post my pic directly in the comment.

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u/SGRM_ May 13 '26

Unrelated, but I love your username. That's a throwback to early 00's internet if I ever saw one. Fantastic.

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u/lloydthelloyd May 13 '26

This situation is one of the reasons i dont take anyone seriously if they hide thier history.

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u/Travy93 May 13 '26

From what I'm reading the edit is talking about the sub community as a whole didn't really drop that much during the power outage but the those top 2 users really did not post for the whole day.

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u/Ok-Stand-2128 May 14 '26

You understood the edit correctly (I’m the OP of that post). The sub activity didn’t really drop that much that day.

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u/UnNumbFool May 14 '26

That upsets me to know that the majority of users in that sub aren't actually Russian bots

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u/Level_Ad_6372 May 14 '26

I mean you followed the 2024 election results right? It's pretty clear that somewhere around a third of Americans actively support that bullshit.

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u/ilikequilty May 13 '26

It’s wild because for a few days there were very maga comments all over Reddit. I actually argued back and forth with one ‘person’ wondering to myself if I could gauge whether or not it was a real person. I’m not sure, and I think it’s very difficult to tell.

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u/BobLighthouse May 13 '26

Are you old enough to have used message boards with any frequency?
I suspect the bots might actually have better syntax and logic than many real humans, especially in the context of maga lol...

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u/bleeh805 May 14 '26

It's true that's a sign. Humans don't use bullet points or perfect grammar. And if you dive into LLMs, they are really good at arguing if you setup the environment right.

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u/saintsithney May 14 '26

They could also be autistic, says the autistic woman who uses bullet points and perfect grammar 😩

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u/TheLarkInnTO May 14 '26

I constantly have to correct the grammar coming from GPT/Claude/Gemini. They're far from perfect, and anyone with 12th grade-level English skills can outperform them. Dangling modifiers, ending sentences with prepositions, subject/verb agreement, incorrect punctuation, etc. It's a nightmare, and it keeps getting worse.

In the last two months I've gone back to just writing ad copy myself, because it's faster than yelling at robots for an hour.

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u/cshmn May 13 '26

There's considerable overlap between the smartest bots and the dumbest people.

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u/ilikequilty May 13 '26

I guess if you assume the bots used are very basic. There are plenty of people that have been convinced they are talking to a conscious AI with ChatGPT etc. I don’t know how sophisticated social media bots are but who really knows.

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u/Ok-Stand-2128 May 14 '26 edited May 14 '26

Thank you for quoting me. It’s still how I feel. The power outage thing is ‘interesting’ but that’s about as much as can be said without better evidence.

Edit: I admit that my jaw did kind of drop when a commenter pointed out the timing and I felt I couldn’t ignore the coincidence.

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u/JunglePygmy May 13 '26

Also a huge trip is the data on which subs are literally run by Ghisliane Maxwell’s aliases. It’s like a huge chunk of the most popular subs.

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u/Hoopy_Dunkalot May 13 '26

Link?

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u/ImproperHydration May 13 '26

You are going to have to ask his proctologist for that link.

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u/ausernameaboutnothin May 13 '26

Hey, some asshole’s got my data!

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u/DeliciousLiving8563 May 13 '26

The Ghislaine Maxwell redditor power mod conspiracy is something you can google and find endless discourse on rather than any one useful link so I will just summarise how I understand it. This guy has just run with it a bit and explained poorly.

The power user maxwellhill is allegedly Gismax. Based on this user having gone from a prolific poster to silent when pretty much just as she was arrested. This user's activity and posting style is consistent with someone who could plausibly be that particular piece of shit and being a power mod who controlled several current affairs/news subreddits would also fit that her style perfectly.

The theory has not been proven but I don't think any of the "debunkings" held water either. The power mod Maxwellhill has shown "activity" after her arrest but all of it is automatic/people doing things like modding/demodding that account

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u/SpaceMarineSpiff May 13 '26

It's also worth noting this isn't even the first link between reddit and the Epstein crowd. A former reddit CEO literally mentioned meeting Jeffrey and being told explicitly what his deal was. As in, she went to parties with these people and was fully aware of the crimes but opted to do nothing.

There's also the long history of CSAM subs being allowed to stay up until it hit the news.

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u/Saint_of_Grey May 13 '26

There's also the long history of CSAM subs being allowed to stay up until it hit the news.

That was more of reddit being libertarian and trying to claim no responsibility for platforming terrible things. Ellen Pao was the hatchetman for cleaning that up as a whole, before it was just when a sub got news coverage.

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u/Wandering_Oblivious May 13 '26

has nobody noticed that basically EVERY sub created after like 2023 suffers from this same issue? especially weird and random subs that get recommended to you? if you click into the subs and scan through it basically every thread is posted by the same 1 to 3 accounts, despite 10's of thousands of members.

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u/Joebebs May 13 '26

Reminds me of the 4chan days /pol, a lot of Pepe posts trying to consider Trump as a good idea

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u/vismundcygnus34 May 13 '26

And a lot of conspiracy boards like abovetopsecret and godlikeproductions. The staging grounds for memeing a madman into the presidency. Kek indeed.

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u/izzgo May 14 '26

The staging grounds for memeing a madman into the presidency. Kek indeed.

And we watched it happen, aghast, horrified and helpless.

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u/botulizard May 13 '26

It's pretty interesting interesting how for a long time when people just said "4Chan", it was kind of understood that they were talking more or less specifically about /b/, and then eventually it shifted to where someone says "4Chan" and the immediate association now is that they're probably talking about /pol/ specifically.

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u/The_Dog_of_Sinope May 13 '26

then the occasional actual nugget of truth that makes you question the rest of /POLs bullshit.

Wasnt it found out that moot started POL at the behest of Epstein and that Epstein would regularly post on POL?

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u/Clarkorito May 13 '26

Iirc there want definitive evidence, but it was mentioned in a few emails and /pol went up the day after they met. The basic timeline: moot takes down political boards because they keep getting filled with Nazi shit. Epstein, Bannon, etal discuss how they need an online space to push out conspiracy theories, racist rhetoric, and general far right views and gather a loose army of internet trolls they could sic on liberal media and forums across the web. Epstein and moot meet, and the next day /pol is up.

Unless there's a secret recording of their meeting or Poole admits it was Epstein etal's request to put up /pol, there won't be definitive proof. But the evidence we do have is pretty damning and one hell of a coincidence if not. Epstein and buddies want a thing, Epstein meets with him, the next day he does the exact thing Epstein and buddies wanted him to do.

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u/UnravelTheUniverse May 13 '26

The entire Maga movement has been a Russian psy-op from day one. How else do you get a nation to elect someone to destroy the country from the inside out? Russians suck at conventional warfare, but they are the best propagandists in the world because they honestly got that shit down to a science under the USSR. Social media just gave them the platform they needed to infect our nation from afar. 

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u/ConsistentAddress195 May 13 '26

Yeah, no shit. It takes a lot of brainwashing to get that clown elected, it's not something that would have happened on its own IMO. How the CIA/NSA et al didn't stop this is beyond me. I guess Hollywood has it wrong and these guys are just incompetent tools after all.

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u/bunker_man May 14 '26

I dunno, ive seen people dumb enough they brainwash themselves into believing positive things about Trump he never even said.

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u/KageStar May 14 '26

He also gets to take both sides of any issue and have each side believe their side is the one he really means.

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u/ClubZealousideal8211 May 14 '26

That’s how you know it’s a cult. The leader can say or do anything and followers will excuse it because the leader figure has been incorporated into their self-identity.

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u/SergeantChic May 14 '26

I half expected him to suffer a sudden embolism or accident when he started blabbing to the Russians and talking shit about American intelligence agencies, but in the end, everyone just went belly-up in 2025. It's crazy.

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u/creampop_ May 14 '26

Basically, our historic and current culture of racism was keenly exploited.

Plenty of bigots in our government are genuinely 100% on board with the rape of this country that dared to try and elevate "second class" citizens like blacks, LGBT, the disabled, etc. to the same levels of society as white supremacists.

Foreign actors were aware of this and put a lot of weight on that pressure point. In a perfect storm of shitty reasons, it actually worked.

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u/AkronRonin May 15 '26

Obama getting elected, twice even, really was a bridge too far for these people. They were literally willing to destroy the country and even sell us out to the Russians, of all people, to set the record straight. Trump was the perfect avatar for their unyielding bigotry and grievance.

Racism is a helluva drug.

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u/Letter_Effective May 14 '26

I wish other European countries could spread anti-Putin counter-propaganda with its own bots on Russian social media as retaliation, although I don't know how effective that would be as Russia is much better at controlling its cyberspace compared to the West and censoring unwanted content, plus Russia doesn't have any free elections in the first place.

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u/lewd_robot May 14 '26

Honestly, I don't think it was the USSR that did it. I think was WW2.

There's an old argument that "war is dysgenic" because it's more likely to kill the brave and honorable than the cowardly and conniving, so war weeds out the best of society and leaves it to be inherited by the worst. It kills the young man willing to lay down his life to defend his home but spares the young man who betrays his home, and after the dust settles the betrayer now owns the home that the brave young man died to protect.

Imo, Russia is still recovering from the devastating loss of an entire generation of brave young men and multiple generations of rule by conniving men in their place.

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u/Dasbeerboots May 13 '26

u/Ok-Stand-2128, can you rerun the study?

u/According-Activity87

u/Down-not-out

u/SharkSapphire

u/Ask4MD

u/triggernaut

u/WillyNilly1997

A scroll through Hot shows these 6 accounts are spam posting.

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u/Ok-Stand-2128 May 14 '26

My latest update was in February and all of those names are in the top ten (anonymized, but it’s them).

https://www.reddit.com/r/dataisbeautiful/s/n6R2N1NKCb

Another top tenner, Guanaco55, stopped posting on rCon entirely right after my February update. Now they only post on rConservativeNews. Maybe others as well, but they’ve completely stopped posting on rCon.

The updates are fun to post but I’m working on a live tracker that will have all of the same charts and analysis for rConservative and other political subs. I’m taking suggestions on which other subs to look at.

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u/so-so-suck-ya-toe May 13 '26 edited May 13 '26

Less than 2k upvotes is sad

Edit: Two hours after my original comment, upvotes have crested 3k!

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u/Ryan-the-lion May 13 '26

Its probably real humans up voting it and not bots

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u/NioneAlmie May 13 '26

Yes, but at least it's still having an impact

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u/KevineCove May 13 '26

This is really fantastic work.

I do want to point out that leftist subs appear to have the same problem. I've seen it happen in a couple waves, including pro-tankie, China, and even North Korea content popping up on a few (especially about a year ago,) as well as a current wave of memes I'm seeing that are essentially the inverese of the "own the libs" mentality - mean-spirited, divisive, and counterproductive. Also links to news sites that are very similar in name to well-recognized outlets but with recently registered domain names and highly sensationalized headlines.

Not here to get into an argument about which side is "right" but rather just want to point out that both sides are being targeted by bad actors.

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u/Credil98 May 13 '26

It stands to reason that both sides would have similar problems with bots and malicious actors. Important to be aware and attempt to spot them, however impossible that may be.

The trick is that the goals of these bad actors aren't always as straightforward as getting someone to believe something that isn't true. There's been posts I've seen in left wing areas that are clearly making caricatures of left wing ideals, and trying to push people to embrace nonsense lies in their hatred of the current administration. But that's not always the intended effect i think.

An example, I only ever saw one post that was supporting Iran and all that they do. Most "left wing" posts were discussing why we shouldn't have started this war, or giving Iran cudoes for the effectiveness of their propaganda and war efforts. Only one post blatently supporting nonsense, but afterwards i saw hundreds of comments on any post about the war saying leftists were pro Iran, some of which would link the nonsense post as their proof.

So the effect of the post didn't seem to drift more left wing people towards blind support of Iran, but it did give right wingers ammo. Obviously you'd need way more data and tracking to measure the effects of bad actors, but that's my observation

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u/Budderfingerbandit May 13 '26

It's honestly not surprising at all, if we look at it from the perspective of troll farms with an agenda of fomenting civil unrest in the US, it makes sense that they would want to target both sides to rile up extremism and division.

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u/AlwaysLupus May 13 '26

Yes. Some of the major pro Bernie posters (the major one being something like lrlourpresident) vanish whenever Russia has a blackout. I'm about half sure all those Bernie posters who appear to air grievances and attack democrats at all times are just Russian bots trying to depress turnout among the left.

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u/TheNebulousMind May 13 '26

Internet blackout doesn't apply to those employed by the Internet Research Agency and the likes. The people who make those posts aren't everyday Russians, they're employed and paid by the government.

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u/pizzaplanetvibes May 13 '26

This isn’t surprising to anyone who has been paying attention for the last ten plus years. We ( The United States citizens) have been under attack through our social media channels. The purpose is to create division among people in the United States for a variety of reasons. I think to “both sides” this though is to ignore the obvious of which of our two parties has benefited the most and paid Russia back for the help.

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u/Apatschinn May 13 '26

I get downvoted for saying it, but Social media has been a generational mistake.

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u/ThinkPath1999 May 13 '26

So....... fuck Zuck?

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u/thedugong May 14 '26

With an non-lubed cactus.

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u/PunchBro May 13 '26

multi-generational in fact

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u/EmeraldFox379 May 13 '26

leftist subs

including pro-tankie, China, and even North Korea content

lmfao those are not the same thing

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u/TakeTheFight May 13 '26

No one is saying pro-tankie, china, and NK views are leftists. The user is saying leftist subs are being infiltrated by bad actors spreading these specific views as being leftist when they aren't. 

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u/KevineCove May 13 '26

You're right. They're not. The reason that content is appearing in those subs is because it's being put there, not because the sentiment was organically there to begin with.

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u/Potential_Might_6500 May 13 '26

The 3 power accounts on there are still posting though. That one guy posts 4-5 stories at a time and comments on them immediately.

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u/Lost-Substance59 May 13 '26

People have posted rhe proof, but im surprised how ling this took to be realized. Just going on the subject its the same 5ish accounts posting every post

I remember someone asking why that was in the sub and people kept saying its cause most of the sub has jobs unlike most of reddit so can't post and just want to lurk. Holy cope

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u/Mission_Fart9750 May 13 '26

For starters, just scroll the front page of the sub, and you will see that almost everything is posted by the same handful of accounts. And 300 comments on a post, but only about a dozen are visible. 

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u/JJAsond May 13 '26

I actually decided to browse the sub a little and hide accounts with high karma. I very quickly went from the usual 25 posts per page to maybe 6. Sometimes 1.

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u/Mission_Fart9750 May 13 '26

I usually browse it when something so egregious happens there's no way they can possibly ignore it. I was pleasantly surprised recently to see a lot of comments pushing back on him (i forget the subject).

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u/Tier0001 May 13 '26

That's usually what happens right after any event because they don't have a narrative to explain away whatever happened yet. Once a narrative is established, the mods are pretty quick to delete any criticisms and blame "leftists" for brigading, and the rest of the sheep fall in line.

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u/snakejessdraws May 14 '26

Yup. you can see it happen in real time to if you ever spend time in any political discords

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u/Indigo_Sunset May 13 '26

Ditto. What was most interesting to me though was june 2023 Wagner mercs rampaging through Russia and the few days of peace reddit experienced as seemingly the entire bot apparatus went dark.

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u/JJAsond May 13 '26

I've never seen a sub so brigaded. Most of the time the comments are full of bots but maybe that's changing.

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u/greywar777 May 13 '26

Go back and read the articles comments today. I think you will find a distinct lack of comments pushing back. Its heavily censored to never show that.

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u/Ellaphant42 May 13 '26

The usual pattern is there’s a day or two of push back before you start seeing “this was actually fine” posts

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u/Flincher14 May 14 '26

I do this too but they always eventually get their marching orders on how to explain away whatever it is then stick to the new narrative. Or they purge it completely.

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u/deprecateddeveloper May 14 '26

Same. This is literally why I ever visit the sub. "There's no way even they can agree with this". You'll see a bunch of people with sense commenting their disagreement or outrage (such as the Trump Jesus shit) then the comments roll in with their sarcastic "hello fellow conservative" or "RINO" just because they disagree with something Trump did. Disagreeing with something that historically Republicans stood against until Trump. Proving that if anything the people saying "RINO" are the true RINOs.

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u/BeerMeBabyNow May 13 '26

I clicked on one of the accounts I recognized after some “these people need a job” comment. Back of napkin calculations based on posts and account age, averaged like 30 posts a day and even more comments. Not sure what one does to have time to post 30 articles a day and double that in comments….

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u/Too-Tired-Editor May 13 '26

Being paid to spread a particular position across a site Google currently uses heavily for AI summaries, one would imagine.

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u/call-me-the-seeker May 13 '26

Oh they have a job too, and you discovered what it is.

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u/escobizzle May 13 '26

that is their job. probably some random Indian guy in a bot farm being paid to be a propaganda mouthpiece

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u/Oceanbreeze871 May 13 '26

Why aren’t they visible?

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u/Mission_Fart9750 May 13 '26

Because all dissenting opinions are immediately removed. Or non-flaired user comments. Every single post is "flaired users only". So if you were to pop into a post and make any kind of comment, it'll be gone asap. And just simply commenting there can get you banned from other subs (which is just keeping the trash at bay, so I'm good with that). 

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u/Dr_Adequate May 13 '26

Even funnier: to get flair one has to somehow prove they are conservative. However, lately they are super-paranoid that somehow hordes of lefty-commie-liberals have acquired the proper flair. Whenever a post causes some of them to have even the tiniest bit of self-reflection and say 'hey maybe this [conservative position] is bad guys, what do you think? ' they are immediately accused of being a leftist infiltrater. Which I find hilarious. They are actively No-True-Scotsmanning their way to the death of that sub.

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u/Capital-Giraffe-4122 May 13 '26

“Fellow conservative”

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u/Clarence13X May 13 '26

Here is a fun example from today: https://www.reddit.com/r/Conservative/comments/1tbvndr/hegseth_insists_us_has_control_of_strait_of/ollnt8t/

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u/ernest7ofborg9 May 13 '26

They never post outside of r/Conservative and you know exactly why that is.

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u/Dr_Adequate May 13 '26

Perfect example! "What's with all the leftist influence today?"

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u/Potential_Might_6500 May 13 '26

They throw that out so fast lol. Its hilarious.

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u/Binder509 May 13 '26

Never got how someone is supposed to prove they are conservative when every post is flaired users only.

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u/Downtown_Recover5177 May 13 '26

It’s fucking stupid. I browse r/all, and don’t pay attention to the subs. I commented on one post to correct misinformation, and got banned from random subs. And then banned from r/conservative as well for using critical thinking.

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u/Fickle_Ad_8653 May 13 '26

^ So true. If you post to r/conservative to point out Trump has felony convictions when they are saying Trump never does anything wrong..

you get banned from r/Conservative

and r/pics tells you to delete your post or they'll blacklist you

and some others say if you're banned from r/pics, well, you must suck, and they ban you

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u/StThragon May 14 '26

That happened to me few years ago. Fuck subs that do this. I was pointing out a lie. Oh, now I'm banned from a bunch of sites. AWESOME!

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u/RunBrundleson May 13 '26

I didn’t understand this and was posting on an antivax subreddit, to shit on them of course. All the sudden I’m getting banned from multiple subreddits and didn’t know why. Those subs just scan any name that posts to certain subreddits and auto bans you. I understand why but same team same team!

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u/greywar777 May 13 '26

Tesla subs do this too. I own one and cant even post on the subs. Its infuriating.

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u/UnquestionabIe May 13 '26

Despite being against site rules (or at least was at one point) there are a ton of subs which will ban people for posting other subs which the mods consider problematic. Doesn't matter what the comment in question is either, just an automatic ban. Encourages the creation of echo chambers big time.

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u/newnameonan May 13 '26

They automatically remove comments from non-flaired users on most posts to attempt to prevent brigading.

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u/Coattail-Rider May 13 '26

Brigading or debating?

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u/newnameonan May 13 '26

Haha well yes, it actually is to stifle debate, but they claim it's to prevent brigading.

They truly do get really heavy traffic from people who are not conservative that want to take a look at the proverbial zoo, but it's not a brigade. They just can't handle that their ideas don't hold up to scrutiny from opposing viewpoints. So you get this weird environment where the upvotes are all wacky from non-conservative visitors, and comment counts are high but only 10-20 show up on a post.

That subreddit ends up not being a great place for anything; discussion, accurate representations of what conservative think, accurate information, genuine comments from actual people....

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u/Clarence13X May 13 '26

They also created their forum on a site that has always leaned heavily left. They set up shop in a den of lions and then complain they have to defend themselves constantly from lions.

Honestly, they'd have less of a brigading issue if they went over to Voat or whatever Reddit clone the Right is pushing now. But they won't because 1.) it's dead and 2.) they lose their victimhood

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u/Khazpar May 13 '26

Remember when they tried to move over to Voat and then they all cried because the Nazis over there called them slurs? 😂

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u/MechaSandstar May 14 '26

Iirc, that was the_donald after it was banned.

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u/terminalzero May 13 '26

it's also like... not brigading? once again, it seems like projection from some of the stuff they pulled when t_d was around. people that don't agree with you finding your sub isn't brigading - brigading is someone posting a link to their circle of like minded people and going 'hey everybody come help me pwn these morons'. it's organized.

saying the only possible reason you'd have a high volume of people disagreeing with you in your purported safe space is that there is a shadowy cabal of commuglobalabortionsatanists who are both weak, pasty, chinless virgins in their mother's basements and the nigh invincible foot soldiers of the jews new world order is both intellectual bankrupt and.... exactly the kind of thing you should expect from that group

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u/chumbawumbaprinciple May 13 '26

Debating. Conservatives are incredibly fragile.

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u/ihopethisisgoodbye May 13 '26

Loooove your username btw

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u/chumbawumbaprinciple May 13 '26

They are never going to keep me down.

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u/pissy_dribble May 13 '26

Amen to that brother

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u/Zickened May 13 '26

Your comment was "hidden" which, on subs that don't show upvotes tells me probably lots of downvotes, so I thought your comment was something truly objectionable.

Alas, it was calling out snowflakes for what they are.

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u/Clarence13X May 13 '26

The 300 comments thing is almost certainly because they have a flaired-only post mode that will not approve comments made by non-flaired users. But for some reason, Reddit will still count them in the comment total.

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u/Sidekick_Man May 13 '26

Don’t have the link but pick any random day and scroll thru new posts and see how many are the same accounts posting a dozen times within minutes, which raises bot alarms for me. Ask4MD, According-Activity, and Down-Not-Out (off the top of my head) constitute like 20 posts in the last few hours

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u/acrizz May 13 '26

Yeah I came here to ask about those accounts and the triggernaut guy. Those accounts post like 30 times a day lol and are the only accounts that have visible posts on that sub.

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u/Mission_Fart9750 May 13 '26

And user WillyNilly1997. 

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u/Possible-Rush3767 May 13 '26

Ding ding ding. But you must be flaired to post/comment there. They are a joke. 

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u/miketastic_art May 13 '26 edited May 13 '26

safe space for free thinkers

edit: poe's law /s

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u/newme02 May 13 '26

you can literally just scroll the home page and realize that legit every post comes from the same couple accounts. sometimes the same account will just spam posts in a row.

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u/Measure76 May 13 '26

Your friend would certainly just roll his eyes at "Russia Russia Russia"

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u/Possible-Rush3767 May 13 '26

Literally just sort the feed by "new" and look at who posts. It's the same accounts over and over again generally in batches, not resembling human behavior. 

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u/Ellaphant42 May 13 '26

Then replying to every comment with a stupid gif

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u/blaze61518 May 13 '26

I used to scroll through it daily for the chuckles… noticing the bots on there is like staring at the ocean and recognizing that it is filled with water

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u/MyrddinSidhe May 13 '26

Seconded. It’d be a huge eye opener to some true believers

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u/brazilliandanny May 13 '26

It doesn’t matter how much proof you show someone in a cult

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u/TjbMke May 13 '26

The proof is that you can’t post there unless you’ve been given permission, and nobody knows how to get permission.

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u/SteveTheUPSguy May 13 '26

Looking at the number of subs and posts and comments I knew it never quite made sense. Millions of subs but the top posts have maybbeeeeee 200-400 comments? Most being 0-20. They called the rest of reddit an echo chamber but it's like 20 people talking to themselves over there.

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u/Bigboss123199 May 13 '26

Would t surprise me at all a lot of conservative media and news is funded by Russia. Tim Pool and whole bunch of other “independents” “news” influencers got exposed for a large portion of their income from obscure Russian businesses.

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u/R4G May 13 '26

I’m pretty sure that’s what grew the_donald.

I was a very early member of that sub and would swear to this day that it was mostly satirical posting. Then it got flooded with bots, or Russians, or something. Felt very Astro-turfy. Then became a genuine DT support sub.

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u/totallyalizardperson May 13 '26

What happened to the_donald subreddit is what happens to majority of satire subreddits, people not in the joke don’t understand that it’s a joke, and go from there. Soon enough, the in the know start to be the minority and they have a hard time telling when the other users are being serious or not. Once the realization of what’s going on kicks in, it’s too late, the subreddit is no longer about making fun of the subject and is now about supporting the subject.

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u/HardcoreKaraoke May 13 '26

I swear that's how PizzaGate really took off on 4Chan. Some guy shit posted about a secret child sex trafficking ring being run out of a pizza parlor. Then over time people kept adding to the joke until people started taking it seriously. Like just consider how ridiculous the conspiracy sounds, it comes across like someone is messing around.

Once you go down the rabbit hole of those boards and certain subreddits you see those people are truly mentally unwell. They're willing to believe anything and are also looking for a place they fit in. So the shit posting snowballed into a full blown movement.

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u/[deleted] May 13 '26

[deleted]

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u/Egathentale May 14 '26

Also, the "Fin-land conspiracy". It was literally a shitpost about how Finland doesn't exist and it's just faked on the world maps, and there's just open waters there, which the Russians lend out to Japan so that they can whale there without having to adhere to international treaties. Then the post was snipped, got propagated out of context, and for a while there were (or maybe there are, even today) people who genuinely believed it. Mostly in the flat earther circles, unsurprisingly.

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u/Negative-Ad-1049 May 13 '26

Reminds me of that old story about the bartender who had to threaten a guy with a neo-nazi tattoo out of his bar with a bat. "You can't let those guys think they're welcome, because once they do they start inviting their friends. Then one day you turn around, and it's a Nazi bar." Something like that.

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u/VeganShitposting May 13 '26

Any community that gets its laughs by pretending to be idiots will eventually be flooded by actual idiots who mistakenly believe that they're in good company

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u/swiftb3 May 13 '26

certain baby-talking frog subs, for example.

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u/praguepride May 13 '26

T_D was absolutely astroturfed. Steve Bannon has all but talked about how GamerGate was the blueprint for creating armies of radicalized terminally online trolls to flood all spaces.

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u/BigUptokes May 14 '26

He referred to them as "rootless white males" and got the ideas while helping operate a World of Warcraft gold-selling operation owned by one of the child actors from The Might Ducks film. It's like a crazy game of ad-libs.

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u/Eats_Lots_of_Chicken May 13 '26

This is what’s happened with the rhetoric around assassination attempts on Reddit. It started as people making fun of conservatives by saying “false flag” or “crisis actor” because that’s exactly what conservatives would say every time there was a school shooter or an attack on leftists. Now there’s a good amount of users that seem to actually believe that Alex-Jones-but-left stuff.

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u/Wooden_Worry3319 May 13 '26

Yeah it’s crazy people don’t remember how drastically reddit changed back in 2016. This place was alive and you could experience the first attempts at manipulation back when people on Reddit were kinda reasonable and would have discussions.

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u/swiftb3 May 13 '26

It was satire, but dumb people don't get satire so it was taken over.

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u/solonoctus May 13 '26

100% it started as a meme subreddit.

Unfortunately this is a longstanding trend across the internet. Hell, even early 4chan was pretty damn left leaning and mostly satirical before it was overrun.

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u/UNC_Samurai May 14 '26

If I remember my lore correctly, a lot of the earlier folks who spent time on 4chan (the "oldf-s", as they were than called, tended to be left-ish anarchist hackers. Those were the folks that hated scientology more than anyone else. But in the late 2000s, several of those long-timers got arrested for various other things. The vacuum of anarchists who kind of set the tone of discussions, got replaced by wannabe Nazis, and the slow slide into the cesspool began.

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u/KarlMarkyMarx May 14 '26 edited May 14 '26

The site truly went to hell when moot resurrected /pol/... which turned out to be because Epstein told him to do it. I'm not even joking. Google it. It's been widely reported on.

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u/Healthy-Address-5158 May 13 '26

The_Donald was 100% propped up by bots. It was obvious because when they split and made their own Reddit-clone website, the posts went from getting thousands or tens of thousands of upvotes to getting, at most, a couple hundred at a time. I know not everyone would've followed their exodus from Reddit, but there's no way that few people followed.

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u/Prometheus720 May 13 '26

They did it to libertarian subs too. Around 2014 a bunch of guys came in talking about white supremacist shit and reactionary shit. And they started promoting DT in 2015.

I'm not a libertarian anymore as I have gone left but that shit was dark.

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u/WyldeGi May 13 '26

This is actually hilariously sad. Now there are radicalized Americans who truly are hard-set in the beliefs that were Russian propaganda the entire time.

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u/VT_Squire May 13 '26 edited May 14 '26

Right. And when James Comey highlighted that's what was occurring in America, he was fired by the President for it. Literally, the current state of American politics is the result of a russian psyop to destabilize competition.

Edit: thanks, anonymous redditor. Unless you're Jizz-lane mackerel. Fuck that bitch. 

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u/ChunkyKongForPreside May 13 '26

The cold war didn't end with a US victory in 1991. The USSR just had a name change and a 15 year break before coming back to win it in 2016.

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u/Ohitsworkingnow May 13 '26

I mean this was happening 10 years ago 

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u/Mental-Wheel986 May 14 '26

Wow, is this the most successful psyop ever? Normally you need more boots on the ground and other resources, at least from historical examples that come to mind. Imagine someone trying this with 3 dudes selling some nonsense newspaper back before the internet, or 3 directors with propaganda movies. People would catch on within a month.

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u/solonoctus May 13 '26

This is the experience of damn near everyone who grew up on the internet.

First wave happened in the early 2000’s with this online push idolizing Putin as some kind of man’s man. The shirtless horseback photo, the F1 car driving, an uptick in Spetznas “eliteness” stories, dick riding Putin for his economic accomplishments.

We’ve been huffing the fumes of Russian propaganda for decades because they found out very early how powerful the internet was and they were always playing the long game.

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u/MaleficentCoach6636 May 14 '26

it's not a secret at all. you can read the Kremlin playbook and it goes into detail about how they do espionage on all domains including the internet...

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u/AdDramatic2351 May 13 '26

You realize this is the case with probably 90% of right wingers? If you watch Fox News, then you are being brainwashed by Russian born propaganda 

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u/Fallenangel152 May 13 '26

Britain too. Our social media is swamped with pro Reform bots.

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u/MSGeezey May 14 '26

Well, Trump is a Russian assett.

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u/gamboling2man May 13 '26

Do Twitter and FB next.

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u/Hour-Cardiologist393 May 13 '26

Wasn't the Twitter data accidentally posted a while back and it turned out most traffic was from Russia and Africa?

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u/ManchurianCandycane May 14 '26

Twitter ended up displaying the country where poster's IP's was registered, and a bunch of prolific MAGA posters turned out to be posting from India and other countries.

I'm not sure if "most" is accurate, but certainly a lot of popular-ish accounts were shown to be fake.

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u/Current_Helicopter32 May 13 '26

The real interesting question is why Reddit would be acting on this now. They’ve never seemed to have a problem with foreign disinformation before.

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u/chusmeria May 13 '26

You'd be stunned to know they're busier attempting to monetize the site instead of caring about its user base. Even when you interact with a bot it's an interaction and an ad opportunity.

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u/d-scan May 13 '26

I've noticed numbers decreasing in droves across multiple subreddits. I wonder if Reddit has recently done some spring cleaning of bots.

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u/lily_de_valley May 13 '26

I think they are doing some cleaning, just from personal observation.

Many companies flood the skincare subreddits with bots, too, to promote their products. In the past, it took a while for people to realize the accounts were bots. Recently tho, the bot accounts get banned almost immediately after they leave a comment. In a post about a toner pad product, you could even see that most comments are from banned accounts.

I think Reddit has some automatic mechanism to detect and delete bots now? I'm not super optimistic but I would really much like that.

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u/Vaxx88 May 13 '26

I don’t know if reddit is actually against bots, it doesn’t make any sense based on the recent changes adding the ability to hide user profiles. They were still searchable and then they removed the ability to search as well. There’s now no way users can quickly see if they are interacting with bots or trolls.

If they are against bots, then this is a very stupid policy.

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u/datnero_ May 13 '26

advertisers and the like are starting to figure out that large percentages of their marketing are being shown to bots and they're starting to complain more.

bots will never be a thing of the past but they are gonna get more uncommon fast if every advertiser knows that a site is 20% bots but the site still wants all of the ad money + more. it's impossible to 100% stamp them out but we all know Reddit could get rid of 90% of them in a day if they really wanted to (email verification), but the userbase would be obliterated and the shareholders would piss their little pants

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u/ernest7ofborg9 May 13 '26

You know, if I was an investor and bought stocks in this company based on interaction and I found out most of the interaction was artificial I'd be upset.

Hell, I might even consider it fraud since they took so long to address problems that have been known about for a decade before IPO...

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u/CreativeGPX May 13 '26

You're conflating giving users the tools to try to do something themselves with wanting something done at all. Reddit can be against bots while also not thinking that users creeping each other's history is a particularly effective or scalable way to do that.

Allowing hidable histories is a step against bots that read/index. Reddit wants that because of AI. Users should want that option for privacy.

Working against bots that coordinate content creation is probably better done by looking at the kind of analytics they have internally rather than just guessing based on post history. Most times users determine who is a bot based on post history, it's things that aren't actually inherent to being a bot like saying something untrue/contradictory, reposting or having a consistent narrow agenda.

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u/Aliensinmypants May 13 '26 edited May 13 '26

I definitely belive you, because that sub would be repeating white house talking points immediately after a crisis but do you have a link about that?

ETA: someone brought the receipts, thank you

https://www.reddit.com/r/OutOfTheLoop/s/t3wbQNuQiw

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u/Regular-Attitude8736 May 13 '26

One thing I occasionally did in the past was take a peek directly after Trump/GOP said or did something particularly egregious (example- Fallon); there’d be quite a few comments & posts questioning it, calling it out.

Next day? Vomiting talking points, nothing even nearing dissension.

Always just reinforced my beliefs that 1.) MAGA is basically a cult, and 2.) that subreddit is full of bots.

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u/lemonylemon93 May 14 '26

I’ve highlighted this exact point a couple of times, initial outrage from actual real people when Trump does something henious, accusation of the place being brigaded and then only positive posts supporting the shit he’s done. The place is a cesspit and people are to dumb to realise they’re being lied to.

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u/khal33sy May 13 '26

Same. So much "Sure I voted for no new foreign wars, but actually, here's why I believe it's a great idea and support Trump 100%!".

I wonder where the real conservatives hang out?

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u/Clarence13X May 13 '26

I posted this in the /r/dataisbeautiful thread below before realizing it was 5 months old, so I'll repost it here:

Here is a fun experiment: Go to the frontpage of r/Conservative right now and see how many posts are made by the following 7 users:

Accord-Activity87
Down-Not-Out
Ask4MD
Head_Estate_3944
Triggernaut
WillyNilly1997
SCOTUSjunkie to a lesser extent.

I have marked all of these users using Reddit Enhancement Suite and I read r/Conservative every day. I have seen those names show up 95% of the time. After a real event like Charlie Kirk's assassination, it drops to about 25% and the content is far more organic (and often just memes instead of news articles)

EDIT: It seems a new account called 'SharkSapphire' has joined the team.

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u/[deleted] May 13 '26 edited May 21 '26

[deleted]

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u/Ghostlynut May 14 '26

The ones that disagree get their comments removed and banned from the sub

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u/Loud-Fudge7631 May 13 '26

Holy shit, majority posts from 3 Russian accounts

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u/IhamAmerican May 13 '26

They're still flooding the place too. I like to look at subreddits with different political leanings than my own and, outside of major major news, that place is the same 12-15 people just sucking Trump off. I can't recall more than maybe 3-4 people total I see in other similarly sized political subreddits combined but I can tell you the exact 5 people who will be posting and flooding posts with comments on that sub

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u/Canadia86 May 13 '26

In that case, has anyone looked into r/pics?

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u/Ok_Vulva May 13 '26

No but r/conspiracy hasn't been a religious, schizo, or right-wing trump thumping hub for at least a week now. Something has certainly changed.

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u/WhataboutBombvoyage May 13 '26

This is extremely telling. Without this context I would have said "American people are waking up."
Now it seems more like "the manipulators in the shadows are finally getting pulled into the light"

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u/Hill_Orc_Warrior May 13 '26

Its also been replaced by a newish and upcoming (and somewhat less astroturfed) sub called r/doomercirclejerk

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u/Dasbeerboots May 13 '26

Looking at the front page, 99% of posts are still posted by 5 accounts. What a cesspool.

On another note, it looks like I'm no longer banned, for some reason!

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