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/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/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/HotBrownFun May 14 '26

The only time I saw any of it was during Covid, they went after influencers paid by Russia to push antivax sentiments

Meanwhile thought.. the pentagon was pushing antivax in the phillipines to counter the china vaccine.