- cross-posted to:
- [email protected]
- cross-posted to:
- [email protected]
Hello from your friendly neighborhood antifascist! I’ve used redlib to keep tabs on the reddit mainstream narratives, ever since I abandoned accounts during the fascist pigboy API ratfuckery.
Th linked thread is a great example of corporate astroturfing against the left I’ve seen a thousand times before. After days of sustained anti-centrist threads, the most upvoted narrative in this one is pro-centrism, after an election where an anti-billionaire, anti-PAC, pro-M4A progressive candidate flipped the con stronghold of Texas by over 20 points. They’re now claiming Talarico isn’t a progressive/leftist, and that establishment centrist candidates “handpicked by Schumer” achieved the landslide. It’s pathetic, but it works for the uneducated and apolitical who don’t pay attention most of the time.
The most obvious indicator of reddit astroturfing has always been when a subs thread flips from the mean of that community, like back in 2020/21 when 9 of 10 threads in liberal subs about BLM were supportive of the protesters, but 1 of 10 flipped to demonizing them; filled with a bunch of troll comments and fash narratives rephrased a dozen times. Usually the astroturf threads will align narratives with those promoted across other social, conservative, and mainstream media.
Edit: also if you go through each username in that thread, a significant number appear to be karma farming accounts with several hundred thousand upvotes = accounts most likely to be owned by lobbyists, guerrilla marketers, and propaganda operatives.


That’s actually why I ditched reddit. Unlike a lot of folks I never got perma banned. Suspended a few times (my favorite one was for pointing out that ICE contractors would theoretically drop some great loot if you needed to arm yourself quickly on a budget).
The entire site is just rent-a-psyops. There’s absolutely nothing there that’s worth subjecting your mind to the massive public manipulation machine.
The only silver lining in the last years is knowing that they got greedy and jumped the shark too early. They sort of shit on themselves before the site could capture anymore of the attention economy. Now anyone with two braincells to rub together knows to stay far far away from that site.
The other beneficial follow up is now (hopefully) more people begin to question who is influencing their media from behind the scenes.
Wasn’t always like that. For many years the userbase was too small to bother. Around 2014 was when the fascists learned their lessons from gamergate and started ramping up the surveillance capitalism backed propaganda for MAGA (cambridge analytica, “troll” farms, bots and brigades, etc), as well as progressively taking over mod roles and poisoning subs.
Even afterwards it was still the place to go for breaking news all the way up to 2021ish, but most users knew its best days were far behind. It’s hilarious seeing the occasional comment in 2026 yearning for “the good old days” of a few years ago.
There should be a documentary on the rise and fall of Reddit. That would be interesting.