I left reddit about 2 years ago before the oct 7th attacks, so I never really saw the reaction over there. I didn’t expect it to be like lemmy, reddits always been a bit islamaphobic and quick to take up US state department propaganda, but I assumed by now though that since most on there are liberals under 50 that theyd be somewhere around “not a genocide, but Israel is committing atrocities and a ceasefire would be good.” on the issue
But someone was calling out reddit in a thread about the flotilla being bombed and I looked into it and the thread on worldnews was full of denials and calling it a false flag. Looked more into worldnews and every thread on the issue is full of zionist saying things along the lines of “anything is justified to get rid of the evil terrorists hamas” or downplaying the atrocities.
Is this just a worldnews issue? Is it the mods over there? Is there some other sub with more pro-palestine news that split off? Has it been like this for the whole conflict?
I was very surprised at how reddit got so right wing. Ask me in 2015-2018 and I would have never seen it coming.
I thought the writing was on the wall for a very, very long time. Reddit has a sordid history with donors, content, and the suppression of non-popular opinions. It has been a death by 1000 cuts. I’ve had a reddit account since before there were subreddits, and I can say it’s not even a husk of its former self despite being many orders of magnitude bigger. What was once a prized resource for most any bit of information or niche is now pig slop fed to the masses by bot armies.
I think at the time I was blind to a lot of the astroturfing and content manipulation going on. I just read liberal comments and thought it was a progressive liberal space. But it soured and flipped.
So realistically, disinformation campaigns have been poisoning Western social media since probably around 2013, maybe even earlier - that’s when I became aware of it. I noticed it crept into reddit’s public space little by little. So it’s not like it would have slapped you in the face. But one day, there it is, and you’re not quite sure how it got there until you look at the path behind it.
When I first joined Reddit, maybe around 2009-ish, give or take a couple years, I remember there being a pretty sizeable libertarian/Ron Paul crowd there.
That’s not to say they were like the modern maga/alt-right lunatics,I think the reddit-libertarians of that era probably would have hated maga bullshit
But there’s a definite path from that to the crazy shit we have now.
And there was always some crazy people there, one of the first subreddits I remember checking out was /r/conspiracy, I’m an enjoyer of a good conspiracy theory, I don’t believe them except for a few relatively mainstream ones, after all, who doesn’t have a favorite theory about the Kennedy assassination? But I noped out of there really quickly because holy shit those people actually believed the shit they were talking about.
And with all of the corporate bullshit they’ve had over the last few years driving away people who haven’t been brainwashed, I’m not surprised that the users who are left are completely insane.
I guess at the time I didnt see libertarians as a threat. They were just dumb nerds who thought something as stupid as privatizing roads was a good idea