Comment by kranke155
5 days ago
There are huge influence operations basically on every national sub.
I found one on r/portugal, clearly coordinated network spreading political news of a certain persuasion.
R/donald became famous because the admins turned on national flags for users there revealing a significant percentage was Russian IPs without even a VPN. The Russian users called it “the mark of David” and compared it to Nazism.
Have you got a source for the national flags claim? I'm not sure that is a feature on Reddit. Most subreddits have custom flairs and some will let you choose a flair for your country, but afaik Reddit mods can't autodetect a poster's country of origin.
Unfortunately I seem to have conflated facts. 4chan pol has flags, and spez had a bit of a tiff with The Donald users where he changed their posts without consent (removing his name I think) that led to some consternation.
There were also investigations showing Russian activity in The Donald. But somehow the flag story is something I seem to have dreamed into this story. Doesn’t seem have happened (even though I have oddly specific memories about it).
mods definitely can't, but admins probably can. GP said admins.
That said I have no idea if what GP said is true or not
Unfortunately I seem to have conflated facts. 4chan pol has flags, and spez had a bit of a tiff with The Donald users where he changed their posts without consent (removing his name I think) that led to some consternation.
There were also investigations showing Russian activity in The Donald. But somehow the flag story is something I seem to have dreamed into this story. Doesn’t seem have happened (even though I have oddly specific memories about it).
It's crazy for me that it's not a well-known thing that Russia, Iran, China, North Korea and other countries are fueling the polarization of western politics using bots on EVERY RELEVANT social media. The right wing bots are kind of known, but a lot of people aren't aware of other things (e.g., TENET Media [1]), or that they are fueling left wing circles as well [2].
People believe that these countries would love to do that, but for some reason, they think they are not doing as much as possible.
[1] https://arxiv.org/abs/2503.19802
[2] https://www.telegraph.co.uk/politics/2025/06/25/scottish-ind...
I suspect the scope and scale of these operations are at least 1-2 orders of magnitude larger than most people think. I also strongly suspect such operations are not limited only to the governments you listed here. If the public was able to quantify the scope then maybe they would be more outraged.
Part of me hopes that some amount of resources are being invested by someone in our government to analyze and assess this, but maybe that is overly optimistic.
No one wants to look into it because everybody is doing it. After Trump lost to Biden in 2020 there was a chance to analyse mass use of Big Data, targeting and psychometrics to influence the electorate. They didn’t do it because that’s how they won 2020.
Then Musk bought X and turned the game around.
They're using messaging all across the spectrum, including extreme viewpoints on both sides. There's a ton of discourse in leftist spaces online about the futility of voting, trying to paint people who believe in political engagement as naive, unsophisticated, or simply uncool.
> There are huge influence operations basically on every national sub.
I believe you. But I've also often been accused of being a bot or working for an intelligence service when posting my own opinion in political discussions, not in coordination with anyone at all, and not pretending to be anything I'm not. I think the people accusing me of this did genuinely believe it too.
Typically people with long reddit histories aren't 'bots', though there are some cases.
What I typically saw was accounts that had a decent sized but very generic history, things like gaming or cooking. Then suddenly the accounts became very politically motivated over one particular thing. Then within a few weeks to a months the accounts were gone.
My assumption these were sold/farmed accounts with reused comments/boring posts that were then used to push a political message when needed.
From the perspective of a mod, the only thing they end up having is the content, and the current patterns of interference they are familiar with.
So if your opinion happens to be in line with whatever narrative someone is trying to spin up, it will end up getting quashed.
Frankly there isn’t any solution to this, and you either end up losing ground to mechanised speech while having a low ban load for humans, or you end up acting on likely mechanized speech, and have a higher number of humans you ban.
The way Reddit is set up, people will select the first option over the second.
I’ve never heard of Reddit revealing the nationality of members of any sub. Do you have a source for this?
Unfortunately I seem to have conflated facts. 4chan pol has flags, and spez had a bit of a tiff with The Donald users where he changed their posts without consent (removing his name I think) that led to some consternation.
There were also investigations showing Russian activity in The Donald. But somehow the flag story is something I seem to have dreamed into this story. Doesn’t seem have happened (even though I have oddly specific memories about it).