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 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.