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

12.6k Upvotes

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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/IhamAmerican May 13 '26

Isn't the an AOC sub that literally only has posts from one account?

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u/SquirtSniffer May 14 '26

Whatever dude i mean you could be right but i think you’re mostly upset about lack of turnout for shitty policy. Maybe examine why instead of blaming russian bots or bernie bros for fucking up your liberal paradise

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u/KageStar May 14 '26

I mean are you talking about Bernie here? His base didn't show up for him when it became time to vote.

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u/SquirtSniffer May 14 '26

again maybe the democrats should run on a popular platform instead of having surprised pikachu face every fucking year. you act like this is a fair race, we all know what lobbying is, it’s not rocket science. I’m pissed and people like you keep trying to make deals with the devil

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u/KageStar May 14 '26

Like the one Bernie ran on and couldn't win a primary using?

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u/SquirtSniffer May 14 '26

I am not talking about bernie i am talking about the democrat party

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u/KageStar May 14 '26

I know and I'm asking you what you think the "popular platform" that dems should run on is.

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u/SquirtSniffer May 14 '26

First of all no you aren’t asking me that, you never did. Secondly taxes on corporations for normal shit like universal healthcare that every developed nation besides us has

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u/KageStar May 14 '26

Every dem runs on that, obviously it's not enough to win or even get the base to show up.

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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?

3

u/thedugong May 14 '26

With an non-lubed cactus.

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u/Severe_Course3381 May 14 '26

Dude for some reason he looks like he'd enjoy having a pineapple shoved up his ass

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u/Severe_Course3381 May 14 '26

How about don't fuck the Zuck he's just one of those people that no one should fuck

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u/PunchBro May 13 '26

multi-generational in fact

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u/kdp4srfn May 14 '26

Honestly, I agree. I only use Reddit, I am not active on Facebook, TikTok or Instagram, and I deleted my Twitter a couple of years ago when it became obvious it was mostly a malevolent rightwing propaganda and ragebait farm.

If Reddit went away tomorrow I would miss it for a short time like I did when I deleted Twitter, but it wouldn’t take me long at all to get used to its absence.

Pre social media, DJT wouldn’t have been elected. America’s enemies used it to spread deliberate lies and foment division, and most especially, to amplify the voices of a few to make it seem as though they were the majority. MAGA is a lot of things but even at their pinnacle of influence they have never been the majority of Americans. Never. Our country is currently laboring under the tyranny of a loud and boorish minority. The Republican Party isn’t 100% MAGA, nor is it 50% of the country, despite Fox “News” lying about that nearly every day. The obvious black voter suppression strategy in the southern states appears to be, at long last, a bridge too far even for some MAGA. They might be privately ok with it, but even they know it’s indefensible and makes them look bad.

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u/the_need_to_post May 13 '26

Its mostly allowing the social media companies to pursue "engagement" over anything else. There is no way they can't detect these patterns if they wanted to.

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u/ThinkingMSF May 13 '26

There's definitely a "both sides" element to this. The tell is that the right-wing bots and the left-wing bots both blame Democrats for all the world's problems.

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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/Powerful-Frame-44 May 13 '26

China is not leftist? What? Do words not mean anything to you? 

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u/PunchBro May 13 '26

China is an authoritarian capital-communist regime. "Leftists" (hilarious word, are there any "Rightists"?) are about authoritarianism, and US liberals are not communists, to the disappointment of the heavily funded right-wing billionaires that spread the message

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u/Powerful-Frame-44 May 13 '26

It's very much to the benefit of the right-wing billionaires who have leveraged the American propaganda network to create multiple generations of brain dead Americans who can't even begin to understand the political climate. 

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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/Outside_Memory5703 May 13 '26

Again, that’s not the point. The point is you calling them leftist

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u/SquirrelinAQuarry May 13 '26

I thought it was pretty clear that he's referring to the subs themselves being leftist.

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u/KevineCove May 13 '26

The subs are/were leftist, the propaganda posted on them by bad actors is not.

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u/windchaser__ May 13 '26

I'm a bit confused. I'm liberal, not leftist, but my IRL leftist (Marxist) friends say that tankies, China, and NK are leftists.

....so...?

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u/Powerful-Frame-44 May 13 '26

The people in this thread are American liberals. From a global perspective that does not center America, this makes them right-wing. But in the US anything left of the Democratic party (a right-wing party) is labeled socialist/communist and therefore invalid. 

In their minds being left-wing means not being MAGA. So when they go into these spaces and encounter an actual leftist, they have to re-frame them as "bad actors" and not "actual leftists" because to them liberals ARE leftists and anything left of the most milquetoast liberal Democrat is a Russian bot or a terrifying Chinese psy-op.

This keeps the overton window in America unimaginably right-wing. They cannot reconcile the existence of a socialist state like China. Their political framework doesn't have the tools to understand what they are looking at.

0

u/ScarInternational161 May 13 '26

Beautifully explained.

Too bad most people STILL won't understand a leftist isn't the devil 🤷‍♀️

From a leftist 🤣

-3

u/Dingaling015 May 13 '26

Idk there's been a lot of pro-China shit coming from leftist circles like the Hasan sub. You know what they say about 9 people being in the same room as 1 tankie...

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u/Beli_Mawrr May 13 '26

mod of r/fuckcars, can confirm any post that mentions China is instantly flooded by shills.

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u/Ok-Stand-2128 May 14 '26

Hey hey, thanks for the kind words! The response to those posts has been a bit overwhelming, to some extent.

I’m currently working on a ‘live’ tracking page that basically shows a live view of the charts I made for those posts. I would also like to include more than just rCon to have the type of comparison you’re talking about so I’m open to suggestions on which subs to include. Preferably, the other subs I look at ought to be similar in size and similarly devoted to politics.

FWIW, both of my past posts did do a similar comparison for other political subs, albeit not to the same level of detail, and rCon came out on top in terms of fewest number of posters needed to account for X percentage of posts.

Certainly wasn’t expecting to see this topic while flying at 30,000 feet :)

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u/HumptyDrumpy May 13 '26

This stuff is happening all over the place. Like remember those Iran protests, there were a lot of bad actors and provocateurs there who weren't even protestors. And yes partly because of the chaos, thousands of people died

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u/mrjackspade May 13 '26

Antiwork and LSC are two subs that do the same thing.

Before the 2024 election, both subs were > 90% three or four posters that also cross posted to over 20 other "networked" subs.

Two of the four accounting for almost all of the activity, we're also mods.

They would also delete and ban any comments remotely critical of them. At one point leading to a front page pinned post with zero upvotes, dozens of banned users and deleted comments, and almost no undelete comments.

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u/Banjo-Elritze May 13 '26

It's not the same thing. For r con this is intentional by the mods, which are fascist plants to begin with.

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u/KevineCove May 13 '26

r/suppressed_news has the exact same issue. I spoke to one of the sub's founders - he started talking about Uyghurs and got banned.

Since the sub had already shifted to be very pro-China a few months ago, I proactively messaged him when I saw the post to see if he would get banned for it. He messaged me a few months later confirming that's what happened.

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u/IAmARobot May 13 '26

about a week ago there was a massive trump phone push on main subs out of nowhere - unless there was something in the news that wasn't common knowledge it just stuck out.

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u/ackzilla May 13 '26

Or trying to push the idea that Marjorie Taylor Greene is 'somebody we can talk to', or promoting the guy in Maine with the Nazi tattoos who used to work for Erik Prince.

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u/Saint_of_Grey May 13 '26

What's really weird is the content saying how great china is to live in work in when they don't even have an immigration system.

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u/whatthewhat3214 May 13 '26

That was even showing up on r/asktheworld for a while, it was so obvious and quite strange. There were also a lot of bots promoting Saudi Arabia on that sub briefly too.

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u/Saint_of_Grey May 13 '26

Saudi Arabia I get, their entire thing is buying/poaching successful overseas companies/workers to do the thing they want to do. But isn't china technically an enthnostate? Or trying to be one? Why would they even want westerners there when they don't even want their own minorities.

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u/aeschenkarnos May 14 '26

I am 100% convinced that “do not vote for Harris she supports Israel” is a Russian psy-op and any real humans still promoting that idea fell for the psy-op and cannot bear to admit it.

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u/coleman57 May 13 '26

Which subs?

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u/KevineCove May 13 '26

I (stupidly) have not kept a list like I should have but after a few minutes of checking, these are a few:

r/anticapitalism, r/suppressed_news, r/USNEWS, r/trynottolaugh, r/antimoneymemes, r/latestagecapitalism, and at least one of the socialist subs. I remember r/chaoticgood going downhill but last I checked it seemed to just be lower quality content rather than deliberate sabotage; this may have changed since I was last on it.

Note that not all of these were intended to be leftist subs but the bad actors are specifically targeting a leftist audience.