When did reddit turn Facist?

Historically, I’ve perceived Reddit as slightly left leaning, with strong pockets of conservatives. Recently though, a vast majority of comment sections seem to excuse violence, such as in this thread (TW: police brutality), where people say things like

TW: Supporting violence> The students didn’t hurt the bullets, right? > They paid to learn so… You go learn today > Um…good? > Follow the rules of the people who own the property. If they ask you to leave then leave. Don’t interfere with people’s incomes or you’ll end up finding the fuck out >> Got it. The next time I stand on a private piece of grass that I paid 200 grand for the privilege of using, I should expect to be shot at like I deserve. I’ll keep that in mind. >>> When the owner of the property wants you to move on? Yeah. Move on. Or don’t and find out.

And I’m seriously wondering when Reddit got so bad that the hivemind supports calls for violence. Are these humans? Are they bots? Why does reddit allow this conduct?

queermunist,
@queermunist@lemmy.ml avatar

We all left. Who are the people that stayed behind?

Also bots.

8ender,

So sooo many bots now

Zaktor,

Yeah, last time I went back to survey the landscape the more anticorporate/progressive subs I knew were noticeably diminished, while subs that get off on the futility of activism and immutability of power structures were going strong.

theareciboincident,

I straight up see top comments calling for the death of all black people on front page subs lmao

alvvayson,

The last natural, human, popular subreddit to arise on reddit was r/antiwork

After that, the site got swarmed by bots and censorship.

If you try and post something even remotely progressive in a popular subreddit, it will get deleted and you will probably get banned.

JeffKerman1999,

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.

TropicalDingdong,

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.

blindbunny,

This should be the paragraph in text books.

theareciboincident,

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

blindbunny,

I knew about TD but didn’t know about CTH.

Habahnow,

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

A_Random_Idiot, (edited )

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)

Notyou,

Wasn’t Steve Bannon involved in that too. Mr get paid by fascist government to travel around the US and after the 2016 election he traveled around Europe to spread the fascist seeds.

TropicalDingdong,

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.

A_Random_Idiot,

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.

zeppo,
@zeppo@lemmy.world avatar

It’s taken me years and reading the explanations a dozen times to figure out what anyone involved even thought it was about.

grrgyle,

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.

TropicalDingdong,

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 victimization, let alone how capitalism/fascism/patriarchy actively hurt them and retarded their aims (aimless though these types tend to be).

Great way of framing it. I just stayed very clear of the whole thing because I couldn’t even identify coherent ‘sides’ at the time.

grrgyle,

Fair enough. Sadly, from my years on the internet, I was pretty immediately savvy to the misogynistic fuel under that fire.

Sylvartas,

Imo, community-wise, reddit is on track to become another 9gag. Which is to say, a crypto fascist cesspool.

JeffKerman1999,

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…

stembolts, (edited )

Conservatives have a lot to gain by building bots to antagonize and convert naive young (and old) people by plastering their dumb ideas everywhere. It’s marketing, if you’re cruel and dumb they want you on their team.

Why do they allow it? Many reasons I’d guess… engagement , capitalism, shared-beliefs.

Controversial things generate engagement.
Engagement generates profits.
Many of the decision makers are narcissistic conservatives who think the same thing, but instead of saying it they just enable it, indirectly achieving the same goal as hate-evangelizing.

A surprising amount of people want to watch the world burn, as long as they can do it from a balcony.

MelodiousFunk,

A surprising amount of people want to watch the world burn, as long as they can do it from a balcony.

I do believe I’m going to borrow this one.

billiam0202,

A surprising amount of people want to watch the world burn, as long as they can do it from a balcony.

“I never thought the leopards would eat my face fire would spread to my building!”

stembolts,

Exactly, my theory is they are too narcissistic to realize that fire will spread to their metaphorical balcony… idk. My own theory seems dumb to me, how could they be so shortsighted?

billiam0202,

My own theory seems dumb to me, how could they be so shortsighted?

There are countless events in human history where that question could be asked. Thinking long-term about the health of the environment and the species just doesn’t seem to be within human capability.

A_Random_Idiot,

Conservatives have a lot to gain by building bots to antagonize and convert naive young (and old) people by plastering their dumb ideas everywhere. It’s marketing, if you’re cruel and dumb they want you on their team.

Because their opinions are unpopular as fuck, even amongst their own base, so they have to resort to paying propagandists and social manipulators to spam accounts and posts about their shit to make it seem more popular than it is, in the hopes of converting some of their idiot base by making them go “WELL SO MANY PEOPLE (BOTS) ARE TALKING ABOUT THIS, IT MUST BE POPULAR, THERE FOR I MUST LIKE IT OR I FAIL CONSERVATISM”

madcaesar,

It’s also so, so, sooooooo easy to post right wing bullshit because it’s always emotional shallow and without any nuance.

So if you say immigrants are stealing all our jobs and committing crimes all over our country! People are already getting riled up, while I have to spend 5 minutes explaining that while we have to secure our borders immigrants aren’t the cause of all our woes.

And while I’m in the middle of my 5 minute explanation debunking your first horseshit point, you interject “Gays are over running our schools and molesting our kids!”…

So yea… The truth has a huge disadvantage in the online space because it’s so easy to spread lies.

stembolts, (edited )

The bullshit asymmetry principle.

It takes far more text to disprove bullshit than spout the bullshit itself.

Then, to prevent your followers from reading the debunking, introduce, “Lol libs sure do write a lot, they do that because they are dumb and triggered!”

And, “I love the poorly educated” (because they haven’t been taught how to apply reason to arguments so they can’t see through my historically well-known hate tactics because they don’t read books.)

But they do understand, “Sleepy Joe!” “Crooked Hillary!”

So yeah, you’re encountering bullshit asymmetry, it sucks and our job is hard, but hey, since we are on the topic of slogans, let me paraphrase a famous one. “We do this thing or that thing not because it is easy, but because it is hard.”

The decision you are left with is knowing when to talk and when to walk away from someone who isn’t ready to listen.

drmoose,

It simply grew too big and corporate. Reddit is not a niche social network anymore. It’s Facebook.

alcoholicorn,

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.

Schmoo,

Reddit was doomed the moment Aaron Swartz left in 2007.

andros_rex,

Reddit also harbored trading rings for CSAM. It took a CNN report about r/jailbait for it to be removed. There was also r/picsofdeadkids. r/creepshots.

drmoose,

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.

whotookkarl,
@whotookkarl@lemmy.world avatar

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.

CitizenKong,

Or in other words, Spez decided to speedrun enshitification.

spez,

Yes

TimewornTraveler,

Well, you see in June last year, Reddit decided to make some greedy corporate changes. So in response, tons of principled leftists departed the site. What did yall expect? Same thing happened to Twitter.

TheBat,
@TheBat@lemmy.world avatar

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

NoneOfUrBusiness,

I mean tbf Islamophobia on an Indian subreddit isn't surprising.

TheBat,
@TheBat@lemmy.world avatar

It used to be limited to right wing subreddits but now its everywhere

Jikiya,

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.

zorflieg,

That’s a choice though. Have you thought about biodegradable plastic or some other composite material? Oh not “metal framework” sorry, carry on.

njm1314,

Reddit admins straight up love Nazis. That’s not hyperbole. It’s a long and recorded history.

AromaticNeo,

deleted_by_author

    •
    13esq,

    Source: trust me bro

    GBU_28,

    Everywhere is shit. Lemmy has those folks too

    card797,

    I said, “when will he die already”, referring to Trump? And was permanently banned. “Inciting violence.”

    blindbunny, (edited )

    I said, “He should be shot” to a picture of Reagan. Who was shot and lived for two decades after that and was banned for 6 days.

    If I can’t say ridiculous things on the Internet where the fuck else am I supposed to say it?

    Raiderkev,

    I think you have AI to thank. Bots are going to take over everything, and I worry that soon comments of anything on the Internet will be rife with garbage like this.

    ignotum,

    Internet solipsism; you realize you’re the only real person on the internet

    Edit: solipsism probably isn’t the right word, i think i heard a word for this but can’t recall what it was

    null,

    Dead internet theory

    Hamartia,

    Subjectivity?

    blindbunny, (edited )

    Anyone worth a shit left already. It’s full of normies and bots now. The “reddit is a psyop” guy is starting to make sense now.

    Brickardo,

    It’s flooded with bots as well as karma farmers. You can tell by the way they write down their comments.

    For better or for worse, you’ll often find real people at the reddit comments when sorting by controversial. Often for the worse, but sometimes for the better.

    then_three_more,

    Probably a bit before The Donald was flooding the entire feed.

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