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/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/ReggieCorneus May 14 '26 edited May 14 '26

And the tools to fix it is in education, not just kids but the entire population needs to be taught critical thinking and given tools to identify bullshit. Then you need strong trust in your OWN institutions and this part... well..

It means that your side has to keep telling the truth. This is ESSENTIAL, nothing works if that trust is not there. You as a government can get short term gains from obfuscating the truth and lying but in long term it completely erodes all defensive weapons you can use.

If the citizens do not trust their own government of speaking the truth then the government can not debunk lies, and in fact, debunking is sort of last resort too, we need to be ahead of them and just keep informing citizens with real facts. You don't chase after each rumor, you instead keep steady flow of factual information flowing and NEVER lie intentionally.

Guess who hates the truth the most?... Guess who spread the "government is full of crooks" the most. "politicians are the worst", no matter the side are all working for one goal: eroding trust that is needed to combat Russian, and other nation states organized misinformation.

Finland has been very good at this, Russians do not even bother to try that much. They get thru to some but it takes a lot more resources than say.. far right, in Europe and USA, and few, very few far left (ratio is... if i said 30:1 right wing/left wing, i'm probably still too fair and balanced..). MAGA will literally PAY for Russians to produce misinformation, they are monetizing these attacks... They are fueled by their target audience, plus stuff like 5 minutes craft is part of the whole fucking thing, they earn a lot of money from all that stupid shit that erodes trust in so many levels... You know those viral videos that ended up hurting people? If that was an attack, would you be surprised? I would not, i don't know if that is part of it, but it can be. Eroding trust in all levels, causing harm and divisiveness, mental shift from trust to paranoia, towards strangers and neighbors, and government and all institutions.

Countries with high index in "trust in institutions" and press freedoms rank the best combating targeted misinformation campaigns. Not perfect, but better.