13 ms·

Reddit Dragged into Russian Propaganda Row

46 points by IntronExon 9y ago

thisisit 9y ago
As this article references another article heavily, wouldn't it be better to use that one? https://www.thedailybeast.com/russians-used-reddit-and-tumblr-to-troll-the-2016-election https://www.thedailybeast.com/russians-used-reddit-and-tumbl... That said, I don't really see how Reddit was "dragged" into this whole mess. Out of all the social media sites, Reddit is the least protected and filled with most of the opinionated folks, if not outright trolls. But it seems not being a "mainstream" social media site has helped.
- pohl 9y ago
  The notion that Reddit is not "mainstream" expired a while ago.
  - naravara 9y ago
    Even if Reddit isn't mainstream publications like Buzzfeed, Slate, etc. pretty obviously trawl reddit to find fodder for trend pieces and ideas for columns. It's also basically responsible for the death of BBSes and community forums all around the internet. It's eaten up tons of niche online subcultures.
    - Cthulhu_ 9y ago
      > It's eaten up tons of niche online subcultures. In favor of much higher discoverability (I'd argue); having a common UI and platform helps. Similar to how in a previous age, having vBulletin like a lot of the other online communities helps with familiarity. Reddit adds that you don't need a separate account to interact with a community.
      - naravara 9y ago
        >In favor of much higher discoverability (I'd argue) That is the trade-off isn't it? The downside, though, is that Reddit's interaction design privileges low-effort, easily digestible, and sharable content at the expense of everything else. Especially the kind of off-topic personal discussion that builds durable "communities" that go deeper than just sharing content about a particular topic.
        mcphage 9y ago
        > Reddit's interaction design privileges low-effort, easily digestible, and sharable content at the expense of everything else Along those lines, Reddit's format (and indeed, HN's format, because it's nearly identical) makes holding conversations very cumbersome. It's like the difference between a directory holding a bunch of files, and directory holding a single file & another directory, which holds the next file & another directory, etc, etc.
        naravara 9y ago
        Yeah. This has been my frustration with the development of social media in general (Twitter, Facebook, etc.) The old conversational style on Usenet/IRC/BBS felt like a group of people talking together. Possibly having parallel conversations with multiple groups of people at a time. The social media model feels more like having a bunch of individual one-on-one conversations in parallel. It's good for broadcasting a thought or idea, but terrible for actually having a discussion. There are pros and cons to both, but the latter is a lot more cognitively intensive and makes it really hard to have the kind of conversation/discussion where you learn something new. If you have a controversial opinion it feels like you get dogpiled by 1,000 people all saying the same thing. It's hard to even know where to start and it doesn't feel like people are giving you feedback on your point, it just feels like everyone is trying to attack you. When you're speaking with a group people usually let one or two people make the points and just add on as they feel is needed. It's a way more manageable conversational flow, and one that's more likely to encourage people to actually talk to each other rather than talking to the caricature of whatever they imagine someone who would say something like that to be. Instead you just get long discussion threads that inevitably devolve into 2 people slinging downvotes and variations on "You're a doodyhead" at each other. In an IRC chat, even if the moderator doesn't shut that down, the rest of the group will tell you to STFU and move on.
- simias 9y ago
  Reddit is pretty mainstream in the anglosphere IMO.
- forgotmypw 9y ago
  Reddit's the_donald community was pretty instrumental to DT's success, IMO.
davzie 9y ago
/r/politics is just as much the other way. EDIT: Not sure if the downvotes are because you feel I support Trump (I'm a Brit, I have no allegiances) or something else. But you can't deny that /r/politics and the other subreddits like esist etc cause just as much drama. There's no nuanced debate anymore. Just pick a a team and fight to the death.
- davesque 9y ago
  I think there's no nuanced debate because a lot of the issues in play aren't nuanced.
  - nugi 9y ago
    Ecactly the kind of divisionist thought refrenced by OP. Most people actually do want basically the same things. Polarizing them helps nobody.
    - zdfjkhiuj 9y ago
      It's the truth. If reality really is black and white, it's not oversimplifying to acknowledge that. Modern American politics are not complicated.
      - Cthulhu_ 9y ago
        They should be though. As in, it should be a lot more nuanced, gray areas, and yes there is a middle ground between ban all guns and arm all teachers.
        davesque 9y ago
        But there's very little middle ground between "there were bad people on both sides" (i.e. What Trump said after Charlottesville, clearly implying that Nazis deserve some kind of consideration amidst a protest in which people's blood was on their hands) and the outage people rightfully feel in response to comments like that. Sorry but there is no debate to be had with people like that. None. Zero.
yalogin 9y ago
If Facebook is used then reddit could have been used too, no big deal there. Facebook at least would take money to show ads, I don’t think they would have taken out ads on reddit though. I wouldn’t be surprised if r/the_donald is full of Russian trolls riling people up.
- vanadium 9y ago
  Why take out ads when you can just infiltrate /r/the_donald and influence them directly and personally? Like you said, way better ROI.
  - nopriorarrests 9y ago
    I would say that ROI on influencing /r/the_donald subscribers with any amount of propaganda is precisely zero. They are Trump voters, period. It's like trying to influence NRA members trying to make them think that guns are cool.
    - tdb7893 9y ago
      If your goal is more than just to convince them to vote trump but to radicalize and spread ideas r/the_Donald is the perfect place to do it. If you look at how a lot of conspiracy theories spread from there I can see it being very enticing
  - acdha 9y ago
    It reaches different groups of people. /r/the_donald is a self-selected group of extremists and there aren’t enough of them to win an election alone.
    - learc83 9y ago
      Throughout the election they gamed reddit to get their stories to the front page. It went far beyond /r/the_donald.
      - 9y ago
montyf 9y ago
The presidential election showed conclusively who the real propagandists in America are, and it’s not Russia. I’ll admit that I didn’t read the article, and this comment may not even be relevant, but I can’t take the Russian propaganda meme at all seriously, either in this lifetime or the next or the one after that. This meme is just more deflection and misdirection by the American media. Feel free to downvote/remove this comment.
- FLUX-YOU 9y ago
  >This meme is just more deflection and misdirection by the American media. Oh sure, totally fake news: >A leak of internal data from the Kremlin-backed Internet Research Agency discovered by The Daily Beast serves as the first confirmation that the Russian troll farm deployed its online agitators on Reddit as part of its campaign to interfere in American politics. https://www.thedailybeast.com/russians-used-reddit-and-tumblr-to-troll-the-2016-election https://www.thedailybeast.com/russians-used-reddit-and-tumbl... https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/sep/27/trump-russia-investigation-reddit https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/sep/27/trump-rus...
- seibelj 9y ago
  I downvoted because this comment is cryptic and adds nothing to the conversation. Saying something controversial / conspiratorial is not automatically bad, as long as you provide some logic and evidence. But this is just devoid of value.
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
- zzzeek 9y ago
  Here is a 37 page federal indictment of employees of the Internet Research Agency who were deeply involved in Russian-produced propaganda in the 2016 election. This is neither a "meme" nor is it a creation of any "media" source. Worth a read: https://www.justice.gov/file/1035477/download https://www.justice.gov/file/1035477/download
  - briandear 9y ago
xienze 9y ago
> Instead it seems Russia's aim was to provoke and divide Americans on the internet and, as a result, in the physical world too. What I really don't understand about the "Russia wants to divide us!" talk is, if this is such a grave concern, why do we give a free pass to identical speech originating from domestic actors? Isn't that also dividing us as a country? BLM, #NotMyPresident, pro/anti-gun rhetoric, etc. -- we have plenty of this kind of stuff floating around already, and in the case of BLM, "the resistance", etc. it's all seen as a good thing, or at worst, "starting a dialogue on X." If spreading these kind of messages online is sowing discord in our country, why aren't we going after domestic organizations as well?
- merpnderp 9y ago
  Intent matters? Or at least it used to, as it tempered the debate and kept things civil. Now there is functionally no difference between one honest side of the debate and a Russian troll, so you're point seems valid.
- noer 9y ago
  I think the idea is that domestic organizations operated (for lack of a better word) by US Citizens have an end goal of making the country better for themselves. Russia seemingly didn't care about the end goals, just sowing general discord. Their endgame isn't a better United States, it's a divided United States.
  - xienze 9y ago
    > Their endgame isn't a better United States, it's a divided United States. But again, if we're concerned about a divided United States, why is there no concern over divisive speech generated within the United States? I mean one of the things the Russians did was organize a resistance march. So... Russian-organized resistance march = bad. American-organized resistance march = good (we had one of those too, unless those dastardly Russians were behind it as well). Huh? How does a resisting a legitimately-elected president do anything good for this country? How does that NOT sow discord? That was the whole point! And yet, we don't see a problem with the domestic actors taking these actions.
rebelde 9y ago
I visited the worldnews subreddit at times. The pro-Russian tilt with plenty of links to RT.com was fairly obvious. I thought about writing the moderators, but with it so obvious, I personally assumed that there was somebody on the moderation team protecting the Russian submissions.
- TorKlingberg 9y ago
  There was definitely something going on in 2006. Reddit has always been rather left-leaning, but for a ~6 month period the top of /r/worldnews was nothing but "Immigrant commits <crime>" and similar. I'm sure some real people got drawn into it, but there was definitely some funny business.
  - archagon 9y ago
    That stuff is in /r/news now, although the controlling faction changes on occasion.
- RasputinsBro 9y ago
  I was going to say "if I call washingtonpost.com links pro-American tilt", would you subscribe to that view? But then you'd say "but the RT is state-sponsored!" to which I would say "there are many mechanisms to influence media other than owning them, see e.g. Manufacturing Consent" etc etc. It's like we're running around in circles with this conversation, neither side seems to be getting to the other side. Instead I'll take a more pragmatic approach. Could you please share one of these RT.com links which you say have a pro-Russian tilt? I want to see if I agree with you. Then I'll share a washingtonpost.com link which I think has a pro-American tilt; I want to see if you agree with me.
- dictum 9y ago
  It can be organic if enough people who share an interest in world news have been influenced by their earlier marketing efforts. In the early 2010s RT invested heavily in advertising to people who can be vaguely classified as "political contrarians", somewhat dissatisfied with how the American government uses its power, but also sufficiently aligned with mainstream politics. Similar efforts have been undertaken by Qatar (Al Jazeera - AJ+). China (CGTN) is a new entrant, but I haven't watched it closely to say if they're taking the same approach.
campuscodi 9y ago
Oh, so that's why Reddit started restricting what sites can be shared on large subreddits. Anything you share on Reddit these days must be from BBC, CNN, NBC, and so on. Only large sites allowed... which is just as bad as Russian propaganda. Instead of the Russian side of events, now you only hear the pro-Western side only.
- learc83 9y ago
  That's not even remotely true. If you look at the subreddits with whitelists, the whitelists almost always include Al Jazeera, RT, and plenty of other non-western media.
bufferoverflow 9y ago
> The US government has already charged 13 Russians, linked to the agency, with attempting to manipulate American voters using social media. Is that illegal now?
- IntronExon 9y ago
  It always has been, in the form alleged here.
- JamesLeonis 9y ago
  If you are a foreign government or individual that wants to lobby or advertise politically, you must register with FARA (Foreign Agents Registration Act). > The purpose of FARA is to insure that the U.S. Government and the people of the United States are informed of the source of information (propaganda) and the identity of persons attempting to influence U.S. public opinion, policy, and laws. In 1938, FARA was Congress' response to the large number of German propaganda agents in the pre-WWII U.S.
- Tech-Noir 9y ago
  It may be in the US. Doubt it is in Russia though. "Charging" them is a pantomime; Russia won't, and AFAIK legally can't, extradite them anyway. (I'm assuming they were and are in Russia, not the US.)
- GCU-Empiricist 9y ago
  Great question. It'll be interesting to look and see what law the charges are files under. . . https://www.justice.gov/file/1035477/download https://www.justice.gov/file/1035477/download Charges 1.Conspiracy to defraud (being unregistered foreign agents acting in politics and stealing SSNs to bring money in), 2. Conspiracy to Commit Wire Fraud and Bank Fraud (laundering money to pay for ads and using stolen SSNs) 3. Identity theft (SSNs) So the answer is yes it's illegal to be a state actor propagandizing if you aren't registered under the Foreign Agent Restriction Act (which I'll have to read and chuckle over) and based on a quick scan of the primary document the indictments are for the way they tried to work around it.
  - 9y ago

46 points by IntronExon 9y ago

As this article references another article heavily, wouldn't it be better to use that one? https://www.thedailybeast.com/russians-used-reddit-and-tumblr-to-troll-the-2016-election https://www.thedailybeast.com/russians-used-reddit-and-tumbl... That said, I don't really see how Reddit was "dragged" into this whole mess. Out of all the social media sites, Reddit is the least protected and filled with most of the opinionated folks, if not outright trolls. But it seems not being a "mainstream" social media site has helped.

pohl 9y ago
The notion that Reddit is not "mainstream" expired a while ago.
- naravara 9y ago
  Even if Reddit isn't mainstream publications like Buzzfeed, Slate, etc. pretty obviously trawl reddit to find fodder for trend pieces and ideas for columns. It's also basically responsible for the death of BBSes and community forums all around the internet. It's eaten up tons of niche online subcultures.
  - Cthulhu_ 9y ago
    > It's eaten up tons of niche online subcultures. In favor of much higher discoverability (I'd argue); having a common UI and platform helps. Similar to how in a previous age, having vBulletin like a lot of the other online communities helps with familiarity. Reddit adds that you don't need a separate account to interact with a community.
    - naravara 9y ago
      >In favor of much higher discoverability (I'd argue) That is the trade-off isn't it? The downside, though, is that Reddit's interaction design privileges low-effort, easily digestible, and sharable content at the expense of everything else. Especially the kind of off-topic personal discussion that builds durable "communities" that go deeper than just sharing content about a particular topic.
      - mcphage 9y ago
        > Reddit's interaction design privileges low-effort, easily digestible, and sharable content at the expense of everything else Along those lines, Reddit's format (and indeed, HN's format, because it's nearly identical) makes holding conversations very cumbersome. It's like the difference between a directory holding a bunch of files, and directory holding a single file & another directory, which holds the next file & another directory, etc, etc.
        naravara 9y ago
        Yeah. This has been my frustration with the development of social media in general (Twitter, Facebook, etc.) The old conversational style on Usenet/IRC/BBS felt like a group of people talking together. Possibly having parallel conversations with multiple groups of people at a time. The social media model feels more like having a bunch of individual one-on-one conversations in parallel. It's good for broadcasting a thought or idea, but terrible for actually having a discussion. There are pros and cons to both, but the latter is a lot more cognitively intensive and makes it really hard to have the kind of conversation/discussion where you learn something new. If you have a controversial opinion it feels like you get dogpiled by 1,000 people all saying the same thing. It's hard to even know where to start and it doesn't feel like people are giving you feedback on your point, it just feels like everyone is trying to attack you. When you're speaking with a group people usually let one or two people make the points and just add on as they feel is needed. It's a way more manageable conversational flow, and one that's more likely to encourage people to actually talk to each other rather than talking to the caricature of whatever they imagine someone who would say something like that to be. Instead you just get long discussion threads that inevitably devolve into 2 people slinging downvotes and variations on "You're a doodyhead" at each other. In an IRC chat, even if the moderator doesn't shut that down, the rest of the group will tell you to STFU and move on.
simias 9y ago
Reddit is pretty mainstream in the anglosphere IMO.
forgotmypw 9y ago
Reddit's the_donald community was pretty instrumental to DT's success, IMO.

davzie 9y ago

/r/politics is just as much the other way. EDIT: Not sure if the downvotes are because you feel I support Trump (I'm a Brit, I have no allegiances) or something else. But you can't deny that /r/politics and the other subreddits like esist etc cause just as much drama. There's no nuanced debate anymore. Just pick a a team and fight to the death.

davesque 9y ago
I think there's no nuanced debate because a lot of the issues in play aren't nuanced.
- nugi 9y ago
  Ecactly the kind of divisionist thought refrenced by OP. Most people actually do want basically the same things. Polarizing them helps nobody.
  - zdfjkhiuj 9y ago
    It's the truth. If reality really is black and white, it's not oversimplifying to acknowledge that. Modern American politics are not complicated.
    - Cthulhu_ 9y ago
      They should be though. As in, it should be a lot more nuanced, gray areas, and yes there is a middle ground between ban all guns and arm all teachers.
      - davesque 9y ago
        But there's very little middle ground between "there were bad people on both sides" (i.e. What Trump said after Charlottesville, clearly implying that Nazis deserve some kind of consideration amidst a protest in which people's blood was on their hands) and the outage people rightfully feel in response to comments like that. Sorry but there is no debate to be had with people like that. None. Zero.

yalogin 9y ago

If Facebook is used then reddit could have been used too, no big deal there. Facebook at least would take money to show ads, I don’t think they would have taken out ads on reddit though. I wouldn’t be surprised if r/the_donald is full of Russian trolls riling people up.

vanadium 9y ago
Why take out ads when you can just infiltrate /r/the_donald and influence them directly and personally? Like you said, way better ROI.
- nopriorarrests 9y ago
  I would say that ROI on influencing /r/the_donald subscribers with any amount of propaganda is precisely zero. They are Trump voters, period. It's like trying to influence NRA members trying to make them think that guns are cool.
  - tdb7893 9y ago
    If your goal is more than just to convince them to vote trump but to radicalize and spread ideas r/the_Donald is the perfect place to do it. If you look at how a lot of conspiracy theories spread from there I can see it being very enticing
- acdha 9y ago
  It reaches different groups of people. /r/the_donald is a self-selected group of extremists and there aren’t enough of them to win an election alone.
  - learc83 9y ago
    Throughout the election they gamed reddit to get their stories to the front page. It went far beyond /r/the_donald.
    - 9y ago

montyf 9y ago

The presidential election showed conclusively who the real propagandists in America are, and it’s not Russia. I’ll admit that I didn’t read the article, and this comment may not even be relevant, but I can’t take the Russian propaganda meme at all seriously, either in this lifetime or the next or the one after that. This meme is just more deflection and misdirection by the American media. Feel free to downvote/remove this comment.

FLUX-YOU 9y ago
>This meme is just more deflection and misdirection by the American media. Oh sure, totally fake news: >A leak of internal data from the Kremlin-backed Internet Research Agency discovered by The Daily Beast serves as the first confirmation that the Russian troll farm deployed its online agitators on Reddit as part of its campaign to interfere in American politics. https://www.thedailybeast.com/russians-used-reddit-and-tumblr-to-troll-the-2016-election https://www.thedailybeast.com/russians-used-reddit-and-tumbl... https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/sep/27/trump-russia-investigation-reddit https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/sep/27/trump-rus...
seibelj 9y ago
I downvoted because this comment is cryptic and adds nothing to the conversation. Saying something controversial / conspiratorial is not automatically bad, as long as you provide some logic and evidence. But this is just devoid of value.
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
zzzeek 9y ago
Here is a 37 page federal indictment of employees of the Internet Research Agency who were deeply involved in Russian-produced propaganda in the 2016 election. This is neither a "meme" nor is it a creation of any "media" source. Worth a read: https://www.justice.gov/file/1035477/download https://www.justice.gov/file/1035477/download
- briandear 9y ago

xienze 9y ago

> Instead it seems Russia's aim was to provoke and divide Americans on the internet and, as a result, in the physical world too. What I really don't understand about the "Russia wants to divide us!" talk is, if this is such a grave concern, why do we give a free pass to identical speech originating from domestic actors? Isn't that also dividing us as a country? BLM, #NotMyPresident, pro/anti-gun rhetoric, etc. -- we have plenty of this kind of stuff floating around already, and in the case of BLM, "the resistance", etc. it's all seen as a good thing, or at worst, "starting a dialogue on X." If spreading these kind of messages online is sowing discord in our country, why aren't we going after domestic organizations as well?

merpnderp 9y ago
Intent matters? Or at least it used to, as it tempered the debate and kept things civil. Now there is functionally no difference between one honest side of the debate and a Russian troll, so you're point seems valid.
noer 9y ago
I think the idea is that domestic organizations operated (for lack of a better word) by US Citizens have an end goal of making the country better for themselves. Russia seemingly didn't care about the end goals, just sowing general discord. Their endgame isn't a better United States, it's a divided United States.
- xienze 9y ago
  > Their endgame isn't a better United States, it's a divided United States. But again, if we're concerned about a divided United States, why is there no concern over divisive speech generated within the United States? I mean one of the things the Russians did was organize a resistance march. So... Russian-organized resistance march = bad. American-organized resistance march = good (we had one of those too, unless those dastardly Russians were behind it as well). Huh? How does a resisting a legitimately-elected president do anything good for this country? How does that NOT sow discord? That was the whole point! And yet, we don't see a problem with the domestic actors taking these actions.

rebelde 9y ago

I visited the worldnews subreddit at times. The pro-Russian tilt with plenty of links to RT.com was fairly obvious. I thought about writing the moderators, but with it so obvious, I personally assumed that there was somebody on the moderation team protecting the Russian submissions.

TorKlingberg 9y ago
There was definitely something going on in 2006. Reddit has always been rather left-leaning, but for a ~6 month period the top of /r/worldnews was nothing but "Immigrant commits <crime>" and similar. I'm sure some real people got drawn into it, but there was definitely some funny business.
- archagon 9y ago
  That stuff is in /r/news now, although the controlling faction changes on occasion.
RasputinsBro 9y ago
I was going to say "if I call washingtonpost.com links pro-American tilt", would you subscribe to that view? But then you'd say "but the RT is state-sponsored!" to which I would say "there are many mechanisms to influence media other than owning them, see e.g. Manufacturing Consent" etc etc. It's like we're running around in circles with this conversation, neither side seems to be getting to the other side. Instead I'll take a more pragmatic approach. Could you please share one of these RT.com links which you say have a pro-Russian tilt? I want to see if I agree with you. Then I'll share a washingtonpost.com link which I think has a pro-American tilt; I want to see if you agree with me.
dictum 9y ago
It can be organic if enough people who share an interest in world news have been influenced by their earlier marketing efforts. In the early 2010s RT invested heavily in advertising to people who can be vaguely classified as "political contrarians", somewhat dissatisfied with how the American government uses its power, but also sufficiently aligned with mainstream politics. Similar efforts have been undertaken by Qatar (Al Jazeera - AJ+). China (CGTN) is a new entrant, but I haven't watched it closely to say if they're taking the same approach.

campuscodi 9y ago

Oh, so that's why Reddit started restricting what sites can be shared on large subreddits. Anything you share on Reddit these days must be from BBC, CNN, NBC, and so on. Only large sites allowed... which is just as bad as Russian propaganda. Instead of the Russian side of events, now you only hear the pro-Western side only.

learc83 9y ago
That's not even remotely true. If you look at the subreddits with whitelists, the whitelists almost always include Al Jazeera, RT, and plenty of other non-western media.

bufferoverflow 9y ago

> The US government has already charged 13 Russians, linked to the agency, with attempting to manipulate American voters using social media. Is that illegal now?

IntronExon 9y ago
It always has been, in the form alleged here.
JamesLeonis 9y ago
If you are a foreign government or individual that wants to lobby or advertise politically, you must register with FARA (Foreign Agents Registration Act). > The purpose of FARA is to insure that the U.S. Government and the people of the United States are informed of the source of information (propaganda) and the identity of persons attempting to influence U.S. public opinion, policy, and laws. In 1938, FARA was Congress' response to the large number of German propaganda agents in the pre-WWII U.S.
Tech-Noir 9y ago
It may be in the US. Doubt it is in Russia though. "Charging" them is a pantomime; Russia won't, and AFAIK legally can't, extradite them anyway. (I'm assuming they were and are in Russia, not the US.)
GCU-Empiricist 9y ago
Great question. It'll be interesting to look and see what law the charges are files under. . . https://www.justice.gov/file/1035477/download https://www.justice.gov/file/1035477/download Charges 1.Conspiracy to defraud (being unregistered foreign agents acting in politics and stealing SSNs to bring money in), 2. Conspiracy to Commit Wire Fraud and Bank Fraud (laundering money to pay for ads and using stolen SSNs) 3. Identity theft (SSNs) So the answer is yes it's illegal to be a state actor propagandizing if you aren't registered under the Foreign Agent Restriction Act (which I'll have to read and chuckle over) and based on a quick scan of the primary document the indictments are for the way they tried to work around it.
- 9y ago