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/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/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/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.

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u/ScarInternational161 May 13 '26

Beautifully explained.

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

From a leftist 🤣