Reddit

People forget how big the astroturfed sub r/The_Donald was in 2015.

It was literally the most popular sub on Reddit that year, with multiple posts an hr getting to the front page for like half a year.

Then reddit banned it after Trump was elected...

It was a clear troll farm operation, i don't think anything came of it besides it being lumped in with the DOJ+FBI report that proved Russia and China helped Trump get elected through social media propaganda.

It is a sick world we’re living in. Reddit was my final mainstream social. Now that I am permanently banned for being staunchly anti-Nazi. Now fully federated. New here, so suggestions welcome!

I've suspected this was a thing for a while now but it's nice to see someone naming names. Many subs ban MAGA/hateful content, so a workaround they use is sharing it "innocently" by someone who's "confused as to what the controversy is". A big one is right wings memes being posted in /r/peterexplainsthejoke with the user feigning ignorance as to their meaning. OOTL is another.

Member that one time?

It will likely be removed. One of the times I was permabanned from Reddit was when I linked a bot network and astroturfing campaign on TheseFuckingAccounts.

Something about how I was brigading and targeting users which is against Reddit TOS. Pretty funny shit that they selectively enforced the rule against me when I was the one reporting those accounts for breaking Reddit TOS.

Once the paid APIs went online it just gave a fast pass to break the rules for those who pay for the privilege.

A good rule of thumb that I feel like everyone needs to know for locating bots is to look for default usernames. When you make an account, Reddit gives you a randomly generated name that consists of "[word][word][4 digit number]" unless you specify otherwise. 8 out of 10 times the account is less than two years old and barely posts outside of these subreddits, and even when they do it is very minimal and only done to "seem normal." And when you really start to dig deep you can obviously see a "hello fellow redditors" type of behavior and writing style.

There are two examples in this very post: SwimmerPlus3383 InternationalYou4065

InternationalYou4065: Only a few months old, has all their content hidden, and yet has over 20k karma somehow.

SwimmerPlus3383: Slightly older, but still within the timeframe of mass bots flooding Reddit. Low effort posts that pretty much accomplish nothing or straight up propaganda. Only posts in a few different subs but consistently has poor English.

It's the same thing in the majority of right wing subreddits. Even the verified ones follow this rubric. Sometimes it's literally a post by a bot filled with bots commenting and bots upvoting. It's basically dead and there are hardly any actual people in there except when there's big news. These places are the definition of "dead internet theory."

The bots are here and in plain sight--getting tough to stomach the reality of the material world too tho

It seems like every day I'm assured that my choice to leave that shit platform was the right one. Can't even type "Luigi" without getting banned, but fomenting hate is rewarded, LMAO, get fucked.

This isn't new .... it's been by design for a long while now

I use redreader without account to check reddit and so many new subs pop up on the front page that are clearly astroturfed.