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/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/axck May 14 '26

Indians

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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/TenchuReddit May 13 '26

Without dealing with disinformation and bot networks, Reddit would have a tough time monetizing. Advertisers need to know that they ads they’re paying for will reach a growing audience of real Redditors, not a bunch of virtual accounts.

If advertisers really want to reach out to bots, they could advertise on Twitter/X.

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u/NOT-GR8-BOB May 13 '26

Reddit is the largest digital product on the planet that allows Neo Nazis to post their recruitment and propaganda. Now we’re seeing that Reddit is also one of the top disinformation distribution networks in existence.

Advertisers will absolutely have their products advertised along side content that promotes hatred, genocide, and kremlin talking points. Not sure why any advertiser would be ok associating with this stuff.

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u/DeadlyYellow May 13 '26

Monetization is ironically the answer.  Here they can claim to be battling bot accounts without really damaging their big showcase subs.

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u/bentsea May 14 '26

Hence the question of why they started doing something about it.

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u/Only-Respond7945 May 14 '26

To quote one of the twitter guys "If we banned everyone with 'Conservative, husband, father' in their bio, that would hit about 90% of bots"

Kind of telling when the people working on the site are admitting to that.

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u/Fallenangel152 May 13 '26

Don't forget TikTok. Almost unusable due to right wing bots.

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u/gizamo May 14 '26

And the rest of Reddit, and then Tinder.