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Reddit is weirdly overflowing with pro Ukraine propaganda and people don't seem to notice. Any even neutral story about Russia brings out vitriol about how obv

Reddit is weirdly overflowing with pro Ukraine propaganda and people don't seem to notice. Any even neutral story about Russia brings out vitriol about how obvious Russia's propaganda is. But somehow they miss the same effect when the story is pro-Ukraine, no matter who the sources are, how unlikely the content is to be true, etc. This was to be expected in the first months of the war, but after so many months of a steady diet of propaganda that doesn't turn out to be true, somehow Redditors still take it at face value.

prox 4y ago
That depends mightily on the subreddit though, as always. The better ones flair or ban the propaganda posts.
- unsupp0rted 4y ago
  The bigger the subreddit, the less tolerant of neutral-seeming Russia stories (i.e. "propaganda") and the more tolerant of heavily pro-Ukraine glory stories (i.e. propaganda). As with all things, it's on smaller community subreddits where people are allowed to think independently to some degree. Even my hometown's subreddit (city pop less than 500K, subreddit membership less than 100k) is so heavily group-thinked that many topics of current national debate are 100% settled on the subreddit and no-go for discussion.
- BitwiseFool 4y ago
  I think you're giving Reddit too much credit. The frontpage is awash with astroturfing, agenda posts, and an obvious bias being curated by a handful of power mods. Sure, minor or niche subreddits can escape this, but that's probably only because they are non impactful to begin with. "Flairing" posts doesn't do much good either, because the vast majority of users don't filter. I wonder if this actually makes things worse because the people who would downvote and present counterpoints have opted out of seeing such posts - furthering the echo chamber. The real power of Reddit is to manipulate perception by a barrage of likeminded content, displayed over and over again to people who don't have their ideological defenses up because they're just browsing casually.
  - rustybelt 4y ago
    Minor niche subreddits are the only things that keep me on the site. The default subs are universally awful.
    - flomo 4y ago
      One of those small cozy niche subs I used to follow is now being spammed by bot reposts. Intelligent posts have dropped off dramatically. It is endemic.
- cantSpellSober 4y ago
  That was more true a decade ago. Once a reddit gets big enough to be useful, it will be too big. After the_donald and similar, strange white supremacist posts started appearing in, say, small programming reddits that had previously been immune to shitposting.
  - unsupp0rted 4y ago
    I also experienced the reverse: programming subreddits, tv show subreddits, and even blogs and mailing lists started telling me to support BLM (which isn't a thing in my country), avoid beating up Asian people (which was easy to do since I was living in Asia), etc I was there for Javascript tricks and they insisted that I check my privilege. It got exhausting, not because it's insulting, but because the signal to noise ratio of what I came to a subreddit or mailing list to see was way off the mark. This seems to have improved a bit in the last year or two, since Covid stole the show, but not entirely.
    - cantSpellSober 4y ago
      That's not the reverse, we're describing almost the same problem
imnotreallynew 4y ago
I run a social media marketing service; we stream all reddit content (~110 posts/comments per second). We run text analysis on comments and bot detection on popular posts. Most people don’t understand how many bots are influencing public discourse on reddit. It’s really concerning, particular that the “real” users on reddit tend to be young and impressionable.
- TotoHorner 4y ago
  > We run text analysis on comments and bot detection on popular posts Can you give an overview of how your bot detection works? I assume you don't have any proprietary information? Are you solely using the text features of the comment to tell if it was posted by a bot? Thanks.
  - leobg 4y ago
    Would interest me as well. Out of sheer curiosity.
- stazz1 4y ago
  fake activity is how reddit got to threshold growth, the trend continues :P
  - perihelions 4y ago
    To anyone unfamiliar with the background: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4139876 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4139876 ("How Reddit's cofounders built Reddit with an army of fake accounts")
- elevaet 4y ago
  > Most people don’t understand how many bots are influencing public discourse on reddit. Well, do elaborate pls.
- raverbashing 4y ago
  I mean, you even see bot comments on threads that are plain copies of previous comments on the same thread
crazytalk 4y ago
Alleged Russian bot here, I was torn apart in a thread about the European energy crisis for attempting a balanced perspective. It's sad to see, but not really worth the time trying to fight against it. The vast majority of folk seem actively happy to be misinformed, so long as that misinformation is consensus among their social circles. Better to use the information as some kind of indicator of the demographic you are interacting with, and act accordingly (most probably, find something better to do)
- unsupp0rted 4y ago
  Don't let it get you down. I was recently banned from a subreddit after one (neutral) comment for being a white supremacist. If I'm a white supremacist, I'd hate to find out what actual white supremacists are. I messaged the mods asking which rule I'd broken (because I hadn't broken one). They responded by muting me for 28 days. Forget it Jake, it's Reddit-town.
  - kiawe_fire 4y ago
    It’s not just Reddit, either. This same story has played out for me on Anime News Network’s forums, some gaming forums, etc. Ultimately I just take my toys and go home - they don’t want me there, and it’s their legal right to say so. But it results in a forum of views that appear to show unanimous consensus that {x} is good or {y} is bad, which is potentially dangerous for society at large and certainly bad for an open society of debate and knowledge sharing. Even worse, I’ve seen instances where a blatantly bigoted, racist, or violent extreme view is allowed to stay (down voted to hell, of course) while my and others’ more nuanced or intelligent takes are scrubbed and banned. I can only presume this is intentional with the effect of demonstrating that “only violent extremists are anti-{x} or pro-{y}, and you wouldn’t want to be associated with those people, now, would you?” I only wish I had an example handy to share, because it’s been pretty blatant at times. Ultimately the moral judgements associated with every political argument is getting ridiculous and (intentionally?) stifling debate while stirring unrest, and most of it feels artificial.
    - ok123456 4y ago
thepasswordis 4y ago
Reddit has gotten...weird. It's at the point where I almost consider that most of the people I'm talking to there on the mainstream subs actually are bots.
- sudden_dystopia 4y ago
  Interesting. I’ve only ever used Reddit for like diy, maker type subreddits and those are pretty hard to fake. Between Reddit and twitter, it sounds like we are being manipulated to the moon and back.
  - ilikecakeandpie 4y ago
    I'd assume that niche subreddits are probably fine, but any that have frontpaged are probably laden with bots
  - the_lonely_road 4y ago
    Can someone create a Reddit where posts are videos instead of text? The community could downvote people hiding their faces if those chose. In the age of deepfakes would that even solve the problem?
    - IntrepidWorm 4y ago
      You mean... YouTube?
    - msmenardi 4y ago
      TikTok?
- Gareth321 4y ago
  I agree. I've been using Reddit heavily for 15 years and it's almost unbearable now. Whatever shred of credibility it had at the beginning is being intentionally destroyed to drive shareholder value. Sadly its decline is happening in tandem with Google's decline, meaning that Reddit is one of the last places to find real feedback from real people about a wide range of products, services, and topics. We really need some decent alternatives, to lots of services.
trasz 4y ago
>Any even neutral story about Russia People tend to approach a country differently depending on whether it's a genocidal regime invading another country, or the defending nation. When thinking about WW2 we think of Nazis in a fundamentally different way than we think of their victims. Another thing is, it's been six months and we can tell how close to reality Ukrainian and Russian propaganda turns out to be afterwards. And from that we can tell that while the Ukrainian one is pretty close - you can compare their estimates of Russian losses with eg Oryx - the Russian propaganda is... far out. The joke about Russian Air Force completely destroying Ukrainian Air Force three times over is not a joke - that's official Russian stats.
- mc32 4y ago
  I think that's fair if you're talking about the warfront. But I disagree that we cannot talk about policies around the war and what the implications are for this Winter, for example.
  - dvfjsdhgfv 4y ago
    Of course we should talk about the implications. We got completely dependent on cheap Russian gas, we failed to diversify, and now we reap the fruit when it's too late and we have to face the dilemma: should we fund the genocide or help our economies.
  - rat87 4y ago
    Sure but what's the discussion? Will winter gas prices suck for European countries? Yes. Is there anything they can do about it? No. Even if they tried to they can't exactly get Ukraine to give up and surrender and it's in Europe's intrests to help Ukraine win
- unsupp0rted 4y ago
  Regardless, when thinking about WW2 we look for evidence for claims, and take neither Nazi propaganda nor Allied propaganda at face-value. Propaganda from those days seems almost comically transparent in retrospect. During war time even today, propaganda is a powerful and pervasive weapon. The weird thing is Redditors seem to understand this fully, and yet assume this rule applies only to one side.
bergenty 4y ago
I hate Putin and his regime in Russia right now but Ukraine (atleast from the pictures I’m seeing) seems to be overrun with explicitly neo nazi groups. In my ideal scenario they both take each out without effecting the actual EU.
- the_mar 4y ago
  Where are you seeing this? Genuinely asking because I always thought that the whole ukraine neo-nazi thing was entirely made up
  - the_lonely_road 4y ago
    It’s no more or less made up then the white supremacist narrative in the US. Yes they are real, yes you can fill a football stadium with them,no they are not even a noticeable percent of the population thanks to how large both counties are. This makes it easy to fill a tv screen with Nazis and sell whatever narrative you want.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  - yamtaddle 4y ago
    My understanding was that they do have a neo-Nazi militia that was incorporated into the official army, and they made at least some effort to clean them up a bit, after that. This happened because the militia rose up and started having significant success against the Russians in 2014 while the Ukrainian army was struggling, so there was a "the enemy of my enemy..." aspect. Whether they have any sway over, say, policy, I do not know.
    - marshray 4y ago
      > Whether they have any sway over, say, policy, I do not know. Far-right political parties only got ~2% of the votes in elections. Not enough for even a single seat in Parliament. If there still are any Nazis in Ukraine, their influence is much smaller than the far-right factions in Poland or France.
pclmulqdq 4y ago
I used to be a mod of a small subreddit and I was a huge redditor a while ago. It was kind of an open secret that pretty much everything on reddit was manipulated by bots. A huge redditor at the time (unidan) was banned for using bots to pump his posts and comments, and that made bot manipulation a lot less secret for a while. It's an anonymous site and you don't even need an email address to sign up, so it's very easy to spin up many accounts.
- qsdf38100 4y ago
  Yet Reddit is still much less affected by obvious and disgusting fake news than all other platforms I know.
xani_ 4y ago
I'm guessing sentiment is "well even if it's a lie, it's a lie in good cause". And it's not exactly easy to even fact check anything
thrown_22 4y ago
Reddit's weakest link is the moderators. You pay the moderators off and you subvert the whole site. I imagine that's what the Ukrainian propaganda ministry has managed. Outside this I find it somewhat bizarre that we've let the unemployed mentally ill decide what is and isn't acceptable for millions to see.
- Grimburger 4y ago
  > You pay the moderators off and you subvert the whole site. You'll also get a sitewide permanent ban for talking about or mentioning the places where moderators sell their accounts for significant chunks of money. This is automatic and not in response to a report with certain keywords. It's a problem they really want to pretend doesn't exist.
  - thrown_22 4y ago
    Do you have a link to that site? I don't think it's banned here.
- BrotherBisquick 4y ago
  > You pay the moderators off and you subvert the whole site. See: r/startrek Any criticism of Star Trek: Picard or ST: Discovery (or any CBS property) is deleted instantly. And redditors still have the gall to describe themselves as anti-corporate leftist freedom fighters.
mhh__ 4y ago
It's obviously better if people always look at things with a sceptical eye but it isn't weird to me people want to support the Ukrainians. Pair the narrative of the smaller country being invaded by the belligerent dictator next door with (in my case) a country where Russia is already unpopular due to various assassinations, sabre-rattling, and so on, its not hard to understand the current balance of In the UK the mainstream (serious) news has been fairly reliant on reporting based on estimated troop movements illustrated by video so there hasn't been too much potential for egregious nonsense. In my obviously biased view the thing that worries me is actually people (knowingly, twitter promotes a fairly distorted presentation of ones true feelings) swallowing Russian propaganda hook line and sinker out of a fairly boring contrarianism. It is easy to imagine the debates in the neutral (or less than neutral) countries of past historical conflicts - you can make your own mind up about how those debates would go, but this conflict (paired with such easy access to differing opinion) seems to be a great source of material. Contrarianism is often a very important thing to have in society, make no mistake, but many would benefit (and perhaps internally do, who knows) from being contrarian against their own beliefs, even just for a little time a day - this goes for both sides of this conflict although I won't pussyfoot by saying that both sides are in some way the same.
- mcintyre1994 4y ago
  > In the UK the mainstream (serious) news has been fairly reliant on reporting based on estimated troop movements illustrated by video so there hasn't been too much potential for egregious nonsense. I'd agree with this. The BBC's Ukrainecast podcast seems to be very conservative here as an example. I don't listen all the time, but when I do it reports things as new days behind OSINT sources. And they're always very clear about what they can and can't independently verify, and specifically call out when Ukrainians are stopping journalists getting places to verify their claims.
- rustybelt 4y ago
  Unless the entire narrative you laid out is the result of a propaganda campaign. I don't think it is in this case, but the presence of this quantity of bots pushing a certain perspective does make me question my assumptions and worry how I'm being influenced in cases that are not nearly as black and white as Ukraine vs Russia.
tut-urut-utut 4y ago
The explanation for that is easy. Most of the people knew with which side to side long before the war started. No amount of propaganda is going to convince an average west European or American that Russians are good guys who just wanted to protect Russian-speaking people in Ukraine. Moreover, no amount of "western" propaganda will convince someone in a country that was hit by the USA or NATO bombs that Ukraine supported by "the west" is fighting for freedom and democracy. With propaganda, you can soften these opinions a bit, but that's the limit. And it just happens so, that both Reddit, Twitter and HN are dominated with the users from the first group, so they tend to believe Ukraine side more.
- mopsi 4y ago
  > No amount of propaganda is going to convince an average west European or American that Russians are good guys who just wanted to protect Russian-speaking people in Ukraine. It's a tough sell indeed when government-controlled prime-time TV shows in Russia promote genocide: wholesale destruction of Ukraine's civilian infrastructure to deprive them of electricity, heating, food and medicine, to drive 20 million refugees to EU.[1] [1] https://twitter.com/JuliaDavisNews/status/1570493649284378628 https://twitter.com/JuliaDavisNews/status/157049364928437862...
- marshray 4y ago
  > no amount of "western" propaganda will convince someone in a country that was hit by the USA or NATO bombs that Ukraine supported by "the west" is fighting for freedom and democracy I have at least one online friend from just such a NATO-bombed (and even relatively pro-Russia) country who is an absolutely solid supporter of Ukraine's fight against Russia's aggression. Few people who live in countries with actual historical experience with Russia actually believe this garbage "NATO backed Russia into a corner" narrative.
  - cbHXBY1D 4y ago
    According to several polls and even the Prime Minister, vast majority of Serbians (80+%) support Russia and blame NATO/Ukraine for the conflict.
MuffinFlavored 4y ago
> Reddit is weirdly overflowing with pro Ukraine propaganda and people don't seem to notice. Can it be called "propaganda" if it's just like, an r/worldnews link to a story on some website and then 100,000 "actual users" (I don't think they're all bots?) on their own volition/will/brainpower spread/support (upvote) the "pro-Ukraine" message in the comments?
- A4ET8a8uTh0 4y ago
  Yes. Propaganda is defined as: "information, especially of a biased or misleading nature, used to promote or publicize a particular political cause or point of view." If we accept that as a definition, it is clear that everything that is biased (* and is misleading ) is propaganda ( and if you think for more than a second, you recognize that everything is indeed biased to a degree ). Now.. whether is it is misleading.. can be in the eye of the beholder. << and then 100,000 "actual users" [...] upvote Believe it or not, people do have an interesting tendency to follow the wisdom of the crowd. As such, social sentiment is a valuable indicator of what they 'should think'.
- danjoredd 4y ago
  If those users are legit, sure. But lets be honest...writing bots in Reddit is stupid easy. I have done it myself. Most things that appear on the front page are most likely not legit. Darknet Diaries, a podcast on hacking, had an episode proving how Apple Podcast top 10s are rigged through bots. Episode 27, specifically. And the thing is...if we can easily do it by pushing mediocre podcasts to the top of a list, why can't we do so with Reddit posts? The API even has calls to upvote/downvote posts and leave comments. This is a thing that Reddit as a company actively supports. I highly recommend watching two videos..."The Dead Internet Theory", by All Time, and "Reddit is Being Manipulated by Professional Shills Every Day" by Point. They go into how Reddit works algorithmically, and how there is a strong incentive for corporations, governments, and political movements to write bots to manipulate karma. If hackernews lets me, I will link both of them and the darknet diaries episode. Im new here, so Im not sure how links work on ycombinator. Darknet diaries 27: https://darknetdiaries.com/episode/27/ https://darknetdiaries.com/episode/27/ Dead Internet Theory: https://youtu.be/DEn758DVF9I https://youtu.be/DEn758DVF9I Reddit is run by shills: https://youtu.be/4uIrnEIuL8o https://youtu.be/4uIrnEIuL8o
drcongo 4y ago
> somehow Redditors still take it at face value There's a clue in there.
qsdf38100 4y ago
Reddit’s Pro Ukraine propaganda as you call it, is mostly telling somewhat irrelevant things as if it was a good sign for Ukraine and it’s allies. It’s rarely outright fake stories as you will see on pro Russian channels. Unless you believe that the mass graves being found are fake. If you do, I wonder what other famous war crimes you think are fake. Also I’m curious, what Ukrainian propaganda didn’t turn out to be true?
- cbHXBY1D 4y ago
  Off the top of my head: Ghost of Kiev, Snake Island martyrs, Zelensky "I don't need a ride" line, Azovstal "heroes" evacuating, Mariupol hospital, Kramatorsk bomb, Putin having cancer, Ukraine bombing their own POWs, Ukraine shelling Zaporizhia nuclear power plant, old man shooting down an SU-25 with a rifle, etc. Essentially the western media just repeats everything they hear from the Ukrainian MOD. According to an American reporter, Seth Harper, who was over their reporting on the volunteer battalion, western reporters are basically given no access so they just have to repeat everything the ministry of defense tells them. This is why we've ended up with so many ridiculously false claims printed.
  - qsdf38100 4y ago
    Ok let’s go down the list. Ghost of Kyiv, likely fake but harmless propaganda. Snake island martyrs, you mean the go fuck your self thing ? It does have been said on radio, but then it turned out the guys were still alive. Not sure if it’s propaganda or the guys having no way to communicate that they were still alive. In any case, harmless propaganda. Azovstal heroes evacuating, well they did fight heroically, I’m not sure what’s fake about their evacuation, the last of them have been captured. Mariupol hospital I don’t what it is about, Krakatorsk bomb, you mean the train station ? It’s real, you can see the photos and it’s pure war crime. Innocent civilians trying to escape… Putin having cancer has always been rumors, no official statements, and it could be true, cancer doesn’t mean instant death. Ukraine bombing their own pows and nuclear plant, is that Ukraine propaganda?? I’m confused. Old man shooting a plan with a rifle? Never heard of that one, probably not official statement, and still harmless propaganda. Ok now Russia’s turn. Ukraine being full of nazis, official statements, very harmful. Bio labs??? Official statements, 100% fake. Ukraine being a threat to Russia, official statements, 100% fake. Ukraine most corrupt nation on earth, well it’s military seems much more functional than Russia’s, not sure who’s the most corrupt in the end… Denial of torture and mass graves, etc… All in all, seems to me that Ukrainian propaganda is culprit of wishful thinking, whereas Russian propaganda is just a disgusting pile of lies and hate.
vbezhenar 4y ago
That's because you're reading western websites and west is in alliance with Ukraine (mildly saying). So you're basically reading a newspaper written by a party being in war. Of course it'll be overflowing with propaganda. Try reading Chinese news on that topic, for example. They're neutral party on this one. What terrifies me is that you people don't seem to notice it.
- AnimalMuppet 4y ago
  China isn't especially neutral. They want Russia to win. In fact, they want to change the world order in partnership with Russia, and they talk openly about doing so. But they aren't going to hitch their future to Russia, especially when Russia shows itself to be both weak and incompetent. They aren't going to aid Russia in this war. But they're not neutral. Their news about the war is going to have a definite slant.

prox 4y ago

That depends mightily on the subreddit though, as always. The better ones flair or ban the propaganda posts.

unsupp0rted 4y ago
The bigger the subreddit, the less tolerant of neutral-seeming Russia stories (i.e. "propaganda") and the more tolerant of heavily pro-Ukraine glory stories (i.e. propaganda). As with all things, it's on smaller community subreddits where people are allowed to think independently to some degree. Even my hometown's subreddit (city pop less than 500K, subreddit membership less than 100k) is so heavily group-thinked that many topics of current national debate are 100% settled on the subreddit and no-go for discussion.
BitwiseFool 4y ago
I think you're giving Reddit too much credit. The frontpage is awash with astroturfing, agenda posts, and an obvious bias being curated by a handful of power mods. Sure, minor or niche subreddits can escape this, but that's probably only because they are non impactful to begin with. "Flairing" posts doesn't do much good either, because the vast majority of users don't filter. I wonder if this actually makes things worse because the people who would downvote and present counterpoints have opted out of seeing such posts - furthering the echo chamber. The real power of Reddit is to manipulate perception by a barrage of likeminded content, displayed over and over again to people who don't have their ideological defenses up because they're just browsing casually.
- rustybelt 4y ago
  Minor niche subreddits are the only things that keep me on the site. The default subs are universally awful.
  - flomo 4y ago
    One of those small cozy niche subs I used to follow is now being spammed by bot reposts. Intelligent posts have dropped off dramatically. It is endemic.
cantSpellSober 4y ago
That was more true a decade ago. Once a reddit gets big enough to be useful, it will be too big. After the_donald and similar, strange white supremacist posts started appearing in, say, small programming reddits that had previously been immune to shitposting.
- unsupp0rted 4y ago
  I also experienced the reverse: programming subreddits, tv show subreddits, and even blogs and mailing lists started telling me to support BLM (which isn't a thing in my country), avoid beating up Asian people (which was easy to do since I was living in Asia), etc I was there for Javascript tricks and they insisted that I check my privilege. It got exhausting, not because it's insulting, but because the signal to noise ratio of what I came to a subreddit or mailing list to see was way off the mark. This seems to have improved a bit in the last year or two, since Covid stole the show, but not entirely.
  - cantSpellSober 4y ago
    That's not the reverse, we're describing almost the same problem

imnotreallynew 4y ago

I run a social media marketing service; we stream all reddit content (~110 posts/comments per second). We run text analysis on comments and bot detection on popular posts. Most people don’t understand how many bots are influencing public discourse on reddit. It’s really concerning, particular that the “real” users on reddit tend to be young and impressionable.

TotoHorner 4y ago
> We run text analysis on comments and bot detection on popular posts Can you give an overview of how your bot detection works? I assume you don't have any proprietary information? Are you solely using the text features of the comment to tell if it was posted by a bot? Thanks.
- leobg 4y ago
  Would interest me as well. Out of sheer curiosity.
stazz1 4y ago
fake activity is how reddit got to threshold growth, the trend continues :P
- perihelions 4y ago
  To anyone unfamiliar with the background: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4139876 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4139876 ("How Reddit's cofounders built Reddit with an army of fake accounts")
elevaet 4y ago
> Most people don’t understand how many bots are influencing public discourse on reddit. Well, do elaborate pls.
raverbashing 4y ago
I mean, you even see bot comments on threads that are plain copies of previous comments on the same thread

crazytalk 4y ago

Alleged Russian bot here, I was torn apart in a thread about the European energy crisis for attempting a balanced perspective. It's sad to see, but not really worth the time trying to fight against it. The vast majority of folk seem actively happy to be misinformed, so long as that misinformation is consensus among their social circles. Better to use the information as some kind of indicator of the demographic you are interacting with, and act accordingly (most probably, find something better to do)

unsupp0rted 4y ago
Don't let it get you down. I was recently banned from a subreddit after one (neutral) comment for being a white supremacist. If I'm a white supremacist, I'd hate to find out what actual white supremacists are. I messaged the mods asking which rule I'd broken (because I hadn't broken one). They responded by muting me for 28 days. Forget it Jake, it's Reddit-town.
- kiawe_fire 4y ago
  It’s not just Reddit, either. This same story has played out for me on Anime News Network’s forums, some gaming forums, etc. Ultimately I just take my toys and go home - they don’t want me there, and it’s their legal right to say so. But it results in a forum of views that appear to show unanimous consensus that {x} is good or {y} is bad, which is potentially dangerous for society at large and certainly bad for an open society of debate and knowledge sharing. Even worse, I’ve seen instances where a blatantly bigoted, racist, or violent extreme view is allowed to stay (down voted to hell, of course) while my and others’ more nuanced or intelligent takes are scrubbed and banned. I can only presume this is intentional with the effect of demonstrating that “only violent extremists are anti-{x} or pro-{y}, and you wouldn’t want to be associated with those people, now, would you?” I only wish I had an example handy to share, because it’s been pretty blatant at times. Ultimately the moral judgements associated with every political argument is getting ridiculous and (intentionally?) stifling debate while stirring unrest, and most of it feels artificial.
  - ok123456 4y ago

thepasswordis 4y ago

Reddit has gotten...weird. It's at the point where I almost consider that most of the people I'm talking to there on the mainstream subs actually are bots.

sudden_dystopia 4y ago
Interesting. I’ve only ever used Reddit for like diy, maker type subreddits and those are pretty hard to fake. Between Reddit and twitter, it sounds like we are being manipulated to the moon and back.
- ilikecakeandpie 4y ago
  I'd assume that niche subreddits are probably fine, but any that have frontpaged are probably laden with bots
- the_lonely_road 4y ago
  Can someone create a Reddit where posts are videos instead of text? The community could downvote people hiding their faces if those chose. In the age of deepfakes would that even solve the problem?
  - IntrepidWorm 4y ago
    You mean... YouTube?
  - msmenardi 4y ago
    TikTok?
Gareth321 4y ago
I agree. I've been using Reddit heavily for 15 years and it's almost unbearable now. Whatever shred of credibility it had at the beginning is being intentionally destroyed to drive shareholder value. Sadly its decline is happening in tandem with Google's decline, meaning that Reddit is one of the last places to find real feedback from real people about a wide range of products, services, and topics. We really need some decent alternatives, to lots of services.

trasz 4y ago

>Any even neutral story about Russia People tend to approach a country differently depending on whether it's a genocidal regime invading another country, or the defending nation. When thinking about WW2 we think of Nazis in a fundamentally different way than we think of their victims. Another thing is, it's been six months and we can tell how close to reality Ukrainian and Russian propaganda turns out to be afterwards. And from that we can tell that while the Ukrainian one is pretty close - you can compare their estimates of Russian losses with eg Oryx - the Russian propaganda is... far out. The joke about Russian Air Force completely destroying Ukrainian Air Force three times over is not a joke - that's official Russian stats.

mc32 4y ago
I think that's fair if you're talking about the warfront. But I disagree that we cannot talk about policies around the war and what the implications are for this Winter, for example.
- dvfjsdhgfv 4y ago
  Of course we should talk about the implications. We got completely dependent on cheap Russian gas, we failed to diversify, and now we reap the fruit when it's too late and we have to face the dilemma: should we fund the genocide or help our economies.
- rat87 4y ago
  Sure but what's the discussion? Will winter gas prices suck for European countries? Yes. Is there anything they can do about it? No. Even if they tried to they can't exactly get Ukraine to give up and surrender and it's in Europe's intrests to help Ukraine win
unsupp0rted 4y ago
Regardless, when thinking about WW2 we look for evidence for claims, and take neither Nazi propaganda nor Allied propaganda at face-value. Propaganda from those days seems almost comically transparent in retrospect. During war time even today, propaganda is a powerful and pervasive weapon. The weird thing is Redditors seem to understand this fully, and yet assume this rule applies only to one side.

bergenty 4y ago

I hate Putin and his regime in Russia right now but Ukraine (atleast from the pictures I’m seeing) seems to be overrun with explicitly neo nazi groups. In my ideal scenario they both take each out without effecting the actual EU.

the_mar 4y ago
Where are you seeing this? Genuinely asking because I always thought that the whole ukraine neo-nazi thing was entirely made up
- the_lonely_road 4y ago
  It’s no more or less made up then the white supremacist narrative in the US. Yes they are real, yes you can fill a football stadium with them,no they are not even a noticeable percent of the population thanks to how large both counties are. This makes it easy to fill a tv screen with Nazis and sell whatever narrative you want.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- yamtaddle 4y ago
  My understanding was that they do have a neo-Nazi militia that was incorporated into the official army, and they made at least some effort to clean them up a bit, after that. This happened because the militia rose up and started having significant success against the Russians in 2014 while the Ukrainian army was struggling, so there was a "the enemy of my enemy..." aspect. Whether they have any sway over, say, policy, I do not know.
  - marshray 4y ago
    > Whether they have any sway over, say, policy, I do not know. Far-right political parties only got ~2% of the votes in elections. Not enough for even a single seat in Parliament. If there still are any Nazis in Ukraine, their influence is much smaller than the far-right factions in Poland or France.

pclmulqdq 4y ago

I used to be a mod of a small subreddit and I was a huge redditor a while ago. It was kind of an open secret that pretty much everything on reddit was manipulated by bots. A huge redditor at the time (unidan) was banned for using bots to pump his posts and comments, and that made bot manipulation a lot less secret for a while. It's an anonymous site and you don't even need an email address to sign up, so it's very easy to spin up many accounts.

qsdf38100 4y ago
Yet Reddit is still much less affected by obvious and disgusting fake news than all other platforms I know.

xani_ 4y ago

I'm guessing sentiment is "well even if it's a lie, it's a lie in good cause". And it's not exactly easy to even fact check anything

thrown_22 4y ago

Reddit's weakest link is the moderators. You pay the moderators off and you subvert the whole site. I imagine that's what the Ukrainian propaganda ministry has managed. Outside this I find it somewhat bizarre that we've let the unemployed mentally ill decide what is and isn't acceptable for millions to see.

Grimburger 4y ago
> You pay the moderators off and you subvert the whole site. You'll also get a sitewide permanent ban for talking about or mentioning the places where moderators sell their accounts for significant chunks of money. This is automatic and not in response to a report with certain keywords. It's a problem they really want to pretend doesn't exist.
- thrown_22 4y ago
  Do you have a link to that site? I don't think it's banned here.
BrotherBisquick 4y ago
> You pay the moderators off and you subvert the whole site. See: r/startrek Any criticism of Star Trek: Picard or ST: Discovery (or any CBS property) is deleted instantly. And redditors still have the gall to describe themselves as anti-corporate leftist freedom fighters.

mhh__ 4y ago

It's obviously better if people always look at things with a sceptical eye but it isn't weird to me people want to support the Ukrainians. Pair the narrative of the smaller country being invaded by the belligerent dictator next door with (in my case) a country where Russia is already unpopular due to various assassinations, sabre-rattling, and so on, its not hard to understand the current balance of In the UK the mainstream (serious) news has been fairly reliant on reporting based on estimated troop movements illustrated by video so there hasn't been too much potential for egregious nonsense. In my obviously biased view the thing that worries me is actually people (knowingly, twitter promotes a fairly distorted presentation of ones true feelings) swallowing Russian propaganda hook line and sinker out of a fairly boring contrarianism. It is easy to imagine the debates in the neutral (or less than neutral) countries of past historical conflicts - you can make your own mind up about how those debates would go, but this conflict (paired with such easy access to differing opinion) seems to be a great source of material. Contrarianism is often a very important thing to have in society, make no mistake, but many would benefit (and perhaps internally do, who knows) from being contrarian against their own beliefs, even just for a little time a day - this goes for both sides of this conflict although I won't pussyfoot by saying that both sides are in some way the same.

mcintyre1994 4y ago
> In the UK the mainstream (serious) news has been fairly reliant on reporting based on estimated troop movements illustrated by video so there hasn't been too much potential for egregious nonsense. I'd agree with this. The BBC's Ukrainecast podcast seems to be very conservative here as an example. I don't listen all the time, but when I do it reports things as new days behind OSINT sources. And they're always very clear about what they can and can't independently verify, and specifically call out when Ukrainians are stopping journalists getting places to verify their claims.
rustybelt 4y ago
Unless the entire narrative you laid out is the result of a propaganda campaign. I don't think it is in this case, but the presence of this quantity of bots pushing a certain perspective does make me question my assumptions and worry how I'm being influenced in cases that are not nearly as black and white as Ukraine vs Russia.

tut-urut-utut 4y ago

The explanation for that is easy. Most of the people knew with which side to side long before the war started. No amount of propaganda is going to convince an average west European or American that Russians are good guys who just wanted to protect Russian-speaking people in Ukraine. Moreover, no amount of "western" propaganda will convince someone in a country that was hit by the USA or NATO bombs that Ukraine supported by "the west" is fighting for freedom and democracy. With propaganda, you can soften these opinions a bit, but that's the limit. And it just happens so, that both Reddit, Twitter and HN are dominated with the users from the first group, so they tend to believe Ukraine side more.

mopsi 4y ago
> No amount of propaganda is going to convince an average west European or American that Russians are good guys who just wanted to protect Russian-speaking people in Ukraine. It's a tough sell indeed when government-controlled prime-time TV shows in Russia promote genocide: wholesale destruction of Ukraine's civilian infrastructure to deprive them of electricity, heating, food and medicine, to drive 20 million refugees to EU.[1] [1] https://twitter.com/JuliaDavisNews/status/1570493649284378628 https://twitter.com/JuliaDavisNews/status/157049364928437862...
marshray 4y ago
> no amount of "western" propaganda will convince someone in a country that was hit by the USA or NATO bombs that Ukraine supported by "the west" is fighting for freedom and democracy I have at least one online friend from just such a NATO-bombed (and even relatively pro-Russia) country who is an absolutely solid supporter of Ukraine's fight against Russia's aggression. Few people who live in countries with actual historical experience with Russia actually believe this garbage "NATO backed Russia into a corner" narrative.
- cbHXBY1D 4y ago
  According to several polls and even the Prime Minister, vast majority of Serbians (80+%) support Russia and blame NATO/Ukraine for the conflict.

MuffinFlavored 4y ago

> Reddit is weirdly overflowing with pro Ukraine propaganda and people don't seem to notice. Can it be called "propaganda" if it's just like, an r/worldnews link to a story on some website and then 100,000 "actual users" (I don't think they're all bots?) on their own volition/will/brainpower spread/support (upvote) the "pro-Ukraine" message in the comments?

A4ET8a8uTh0 4y ago
Yes. Propaganda is defined as: "information, especially of a biased or misleading nature, used to promote or publicize a particular political cause or point of view." If we accept that as a definition, it is clear that everything that is biased (* and is misleading ) is propaganda ( and if you think for more than a second, you recognize that everything is indeed biased to a degree ). Now.. whether is it is misleading.. can be in the eye of the beholder. << and then 100,000 "actual users" [...] upvote Believe it or not, people do have an interesting tendency to follow the wisdom of the crowd. As such, social sentiment is a valuable indicator of what they 'should think'.
danjoredd 4y ago
If those users are legit, sure. But lets be honest...writing bots in Reddit is stupid easy. I have done it myself. Most things that appear on the front page are most likely not legit. Darknet Diaries, a podcast on hacking, had an episode proving how Apple Podcast top 10s are rigged through bots. Episode 27, specifically. And the thing is...if we can easily do it by pushing mediocre podcasts to the top of a list, why can't we do so with Reddit posts? The API even has calls to upvote/downvote posts and leave comments. This is a thing that Reddit as a company actively supports. I highly recommend watching two videos..."The Dead Internet Theory", by All Time, and "Reddit is Being Manipulated by Professional Shills Every Day" by Point. They go into how Reddit works algorithmically, and how there is a strong incentive for corporations, governments, and political movements to write bots to manipulate karma. If hackernews lets me, I will link both of them and the darknet diaries episode. Im new here, so Im not sure how links work on ycombinator. Darknet diaries 27: https://darknetdiaries.com/episode/27/ https://darknetdiaries.com/episode/27/ Dead Internet Theory: https://youtu.be/DEn758DVF9I https://youtu.be/DEn758DVF9I Reddit is run by shills: https://youtu.be/4uIrnEIuL8o https://youtu.be/4uIrnEIuL8o

drcongo 4y ago

> somehow Redditors still take it at face value There's a clue in there.

qsdf38100 4y ago

Reddit’s Pro Ukraine propaganda as you call it, is mostly telling somewhat irrelevant things as if it was a good sign for Ukraine and it’s allies. It’s rarely outright fake stories as you will see on pro Russian channels. Unless you believe that the mass graves being found are fake. If you do, I wonder what other famous war crimes you think are fake. Also I’m curious, what Ukrainian propaganda didn’t turn out to be true?

cbHXBY1D 4y ago
Off the top of my head: Ghost of Kiev, Snake Island martyrs, Zelensky "I don't need a ride" line, Azovstal "heroes" evacuating, Mariupol hospital, Kramatorsk bomb, Putin having cancer, Ukraine bombing their own POWs, Ukraine shelling Zaporizhia nuclear power plant, old man shooting down an SU-25 with a rifle, etc. Essentially the western media just repeats everything they hear from the Ukrainian MOD. According to an American reporter, Seth Harper, who was over their reporting on the volunteer battalion, western reporters are basically given no access so they just have to repeat everything the ministry of defense tells them. This is why we've ended up with so many ridiculously false claims printed.
- qsdf38100 4y ago
  Ok let’s go down the list. Ghost of Kyiv, likely fake but harmless propaganda. Snake island martyrs, you mean the go fuck your self thing ? It does have been said on radio, but then it turned out the guys were still alive. Not sure if it’s propaganda or the guys having no way to communicate that they were still alive. In any case, harmless propaganda. Azovstal heroes evacuating, well they did fight heroically, I’m not sure what’s fake about their evacuation, the last of them have been captured. Mariupol hospital I don’t what it is about, Krakatorsk bomb, you mean the train station ? It’s real, you can see the photos and it’s pure war crime. Innocent civilians trying to escape… Putin having cancer has always been rumors, no official statements, and it could be true, cancer doesn’t mean instant death. Ukraine bombing their own pows and nuclear plant, is that Ukraine propaganda?? I’m confused. Old man shooting a plan with a rifle? Never heard of that one, probably not official statement, and still harmless propaganda. Ok now Russia’s turn. Ukraine being full of nazis, official statements, very harmful. Bio labs??? Official statements, 100% fake. Ukraine being a threat to Russia, official statements, 100% fake. Ukraine most corrupt nation on earth, well it’s military seems much more functional than Russia’s, not sure who’s the most corrupt in the end… Denial of torture and mass graves, etc… All in all, seems to me that Ukrainian propaganda is culprit of wishful thinking, whereas Russian propaganda is just a disgusting pile of lies and hate.

vbezhenar 4y ago

That's because you're reading western websites and west is in alliance with Ukraine (mildly saying). So you're basically reading a newspaper written by a party being in war. Of course it'll be overflowing with propaganda. Try reading Chinese news on that topic, for example. They're neutral party on this one. What terrifies me is that you people don't seem to notice it.

AnimalMuppet 4y ago
China isn't especially neutral. They want Russia to win. In fact, they want to change the world order in partnership with Russia, and they talk openly about doing so. But they aren't going to hitch their future to Russia, especially when Russia shows itself to be both weak and incompetent. They aren't going to aid Russia in this war. But they're not neutral. Their news about the war is going to have a definite slant.