Probably a bit before The Donald was flooding the entire feed.
this post was submitted on 03 May 2024
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June 30th, 2023. There were always subreddits like r/thedonald that used violent right wing authoritarian cult-like political rhetoric, but after the users and mods who gave half a shit left when they banned third party apps and sided with advertisers over the people keeping it from becoming 99% bots and bootlickers.
I assume it happened around the time most of us left for other places. The fascist community there probably hasn't grown much in numbers, but as a percentage it increased because the decent people left.
Reddit admins straight up love Nazis. That's not hyperbole. It's a long and recorded history.
Historically, I've perceived Reddit as slightly left leaning, with strong pockets of conservatives.
Yes, in international subreddits. The national ones were often right leaning (e.g. r/Canada, r/Mexico).
Spez is a fascist, dude allowed nazi propaganda on his platform in the name of "free speech". Users are disgusted by what's on r/popular so the nazi population percentage grows. Add to this the complete eradication of mod tools and you get bots and extremists invasions.
Imo, community-wise, reddit is on track to become another 9gag. Which is to say, a crypto fascist cesspool.
Yeah, I'm still active in the formula1 and NBA subs because politics there is practically banned. There was some drama lately because trump said it's his merit if Lando Norris won the Miami Gran Prix...
If it wasn't for reddit supporting /r/TheDonald, there is a good chance MAGA might not have ever happened, at least not in the way it manifested.
Trump was able to get a significance amount of grassroots support early on, and it almost all came from /r/TheDonald. This was before anything was really happening on other social media. People that were disenfranchised with Obama pretty much went with either Bernie or Trump. It was a warzone on Reddit. Both Bernie and Trump did AMA's and this blew them up popularity wise.
What Bernie didn't have that Trump did was an army of russian bots supporting him.
idk, I disagree that /r/TheDonald's existence was what sparked MAGA. Russia had such a heavy hand in the creation and support of MAGA that they would have found another place to start the fire. TheDonald was just the largest pile of kindle available... with many more around it. I could imagine they would have focused even harder on facebook, or news coverage or whatever else.
Regardless, I do agree with the rest of your point that TheDonald had a huge influence on MAGA
Nah, if you want to point at the thing that made all this happen..then its not MAGA.
it was Gamergate.
Gamergate was the prototype and test run for the foreign provocateurs, right wing extremists and other hate mongers to see how successful such a large scale attempt at manipulation of narratives and communities could be.. and it proved quite successful, and the same tactics and methods were scaled up even further to lay the groundwork for Trumpism and what we have today.
Gamergate was the Trinity test that lead to Littleboy (general uptick in rightwing extremism/fascism/alt-rightism and approval of such) and FatMan (Russian "Useful Idiots" who came to power, or threatened to, with Russian backing, not just in America, but elsewhere)
I was so confused by gamergate.
you are very into something but the whole thing was so just,,, incoherent. Like I still don't really get what gamergate was because it was like a Russian nesting doll of gaslighting.
It was whatever you wanted it to be. I had one friend who bought the line that it was about "ethics in journalism" (imagine me doing a concussive eye roll here). He was on the redpill path at the time (luckily pulled back from the edge since). Anyway, I think the melange of ideologies to sample from gamer gate were appealing to people who felt victimised by society, but didn't want to acknowledge their role in their victimisation, let alone how capitalism/fascism/patriarchy actively hurt them and retarded their aims (aimless though these types tend to be).
It's classic cruel optimism.
it was a test run that was more successful than the puppet masters ever anticipated, Which is why the only real coherent message out of it was the right wings downright contempt for women.
and those same tactics, and hell, even topics, are still being used today with Trumpism, Right Wing Extremism, and the Russian Puppets push for fascism in western countries.
This should be the paragraph in text books.
In hindsight it was pretty fucking obvious when TD was regularly inspiring terrorist attacks and was allowed to thrive while CTH got banned for saying 17th century slave owners deserve death
Two things are happening simultaneously Russia/China are trying to spread discontent, and Trumps followers are being told they no longer have to abide by social norms that keeps societies civil.
I believe the uncivil thing just always comes in waves as the people that don't like change are forced to change and get resentful. Some kind of event happens and resets the floor, or all the people that don't want to change die off, and things settle down.
And this is the mental framework through which I see the world.
Everywhere is shit. Lemmy has those folks too
My theory is that if you were really principled, you would have got out of there a long time ago. So what you've got left are people who are ok to put up with a shitty status quo, so long as they get their fix. You know, moderates.
I don't go on reddit anymore, but if it's full of people who put up with shit, then it's only natural that the shit started rolling in.
It simply grew too big and corporate. Reddit is not a niche social network anymore. It's Facebook.
It was never a niche social network. In the beginning, Spez used sockpuppets to fake engagement, later on advertisers and state actors (In 2016, they forgot to scrub the bots from their statistics, and posted that Eglin Airforce Base was the most reddit-addicted city) generated engagement.
What it absolutely was a niche network to the point where if reddit was mentioned in mainstream media it made big waves. Dudes even had secret greetings like when does the narval bacon or smt like that I don't remember. But reddit was super niche and that's what made it special imo. The first secret santa exchanges were trully amazing, unique experiences that will never be replicated again and the platform was full of these niche little gems that are forever lost now.
Fascism's quite profitable until they start rounding people up.
Helping keep track of who to round up was very profitable for IBM, and it was for Facebook in Myanmar.
I left reddit for good 4 years ago for just this reason. I suspect it was well before that, like when someone tracked the IPS of reddit users and discovered that the most redditors were in the town where Eglin Air Force base is located. Now there's more bots but they used to have more people just doing the same shit. Lots of large police forces have big social media teams I wonder what they do. And the most prolific mod and poster of their time was likely Ghislaine Maxwell. Oh and their CEO made their career in the CIA before coming over to Reddit, which from what we know about people who left the CIA to go into media, is that they never really left
Interesting hypothesis, would you mind citing some sources for those claims? I never heard of spez being CIA or any of the other rather huge claims you make.
Friendly reminder the "block user" function is available on all your favorite platforms. Much like we had to invest the time in filtering mail back in the day, so do we have to do the same for comment threads now.
I don't think this will solve the issue OP is describing. They're concerned at the existence of fascists on reddit, not just that they are seeing them. Blocking them all would be more like sticking your fingers in your ears and saying it doesn't exist.
This shit is spreading everywhere, even to non-US subreddits. I regularly saw anti-muslim, homophobic comments on supposedly non-political subreddits like /r/indianboysontinder.
Even self-proclaimed feminist subreddit like TwoXIndia has their members posting BJP talking points when duscussion turn to politics
I mean tbf Islamophobia on an Indian subreddit isn't surprising.
ever since occupy wallstreet scared the elites, reddit and other social media had a target on its back. Even 4chan. Itsbombarded by noise now.
Has Redditc become more right wing or have you become more left wing.
It didn't. Lemmy is ultra liberal so Reddit appears fascist.
Yeah, I don't support most of the crackdowns on the protests, but it's silly to think that people are suddenly fascist for wanting state power to crack down on what they BELIEVE is antisemitism. If I believed that the protesters were doing it more out of weird racist shit than concern for Palestinians, I would want them out too. ESPECIALLY now.
And before you say "well they should know better!" I mean sure, but not everyone has the luxury of spending tons of time analyzing every single piece of news, looking into multiple sources, reading the history of a middle east region the size of New Jersey, etc, etc. What makes it even harder is that Israel and Palestine are ultimately foreign countries, no matter how much of an alliance the U.S has with Isreal, it's still a country in the middle East.
Then there is the nuance, Hamas are still terrorists and Netanyahu even supported them until October 7th, Israelies were trying to actively get red of the guy until the 7th, the country was set up by the British have both sides fight and hate eachother forever, real antisemitism is rising all over the world and fascists are trying to take advantage of that and connect it to Israel-Palestine. Then Add media bias and how even video footage can be fake with AI and you have a basically completely out of control situation.
Eh the brits were just following the example the Ottoman Empire set.
Source? I'll admit I'm very new to Israel-Palestine, that's why I keep quiet about it most of the time, but I felt like speaking up for other people who know even less about the issue would be a good idea here on Lemmy where people seem to have a great deal of knowledge on the subject.
Its not specific to Palestine as it was due to how the Ottoman empire typically left the existing adminstration structures in place when they conquered regions.
Then, many of its sultans used rival groups against each other, typically to their own benefit as both groups jockied for power over the other.
An example whwre this benefitted them was Mehmud(1 or 2), who used two rival groups dislike of each other to make them both weaker and his own position much stronger.
An example of this backfiring on them was the uprising / rebellion of Egypt.
Also, notably, non-muslims(and non-male muslims) were explicitly inferior citizens in the eyes of Ottoman law. They(example: christians and jews) were allowed to make their own communities, but they weren't seen as equals and would be fair game to be enslaved.
Source: the Ottoman Empire by Kenneth W Harl as well as https://www.britannica.com/place/Ottoman-Empire
Idk, the subs I used to frequent the most have definitely shifted to the right.
Worldnews over there is just a horrendous shitpile of fascism and Hasbara. It used to be way more variable depending on time of day and stuff.
Same as it ever was, only now events have changed. There never was a massive exodus from Reddit, so the opinions you see there are a better representation of the masses than the limited ones you read here.
At most a few hundred people will vote on a post like this. That's all you really need to know.
Nope, the Israel Palestine occupation has been a thing for decades. Redfit was different in, say, 2014 (another hostage situation) to what it is now.
Personally I think it has a lot to do with the total unleashing of bots and astroturfers, but it's definitely noticeable to me.
I've been using reddit since 2008 and the idea of any conservative bullshit on there would have been really surprising before 2015. Overall though the amount of generic person stupidity has increased in the past few years. Not that all sports fans are like this, but often i get the stupidest reply from someone - like, close minded, blithely cruel about whatever topic - and look at their profile and the ONLY other thing they've commented on is sports.
Then you're replying to Russian bots.....
No, the conclusion would be that they're replying to me. However I'm quite certain Americans like that exist as well.
Oh, I'm certain that they do exist, but also it's a known Russian tactic to spread disinformation . https://youtu.be/3X2puLun3-8?si=8mL_b72va5bLn2pL