Historically, I’ve perceived Reddit as slightly left leaning, with strong pockets of conservatives. Recently though, a vast majority of comment sections seem to excuse violence, such as in this thread (TW: police brutality), where people say things like
TW: Supporting violence
The students didn’t hurt the bullets, right?
They paid to learn so… You go learn today
Um…good?
Follow the rules of the people who own the property. If they ask you to leave then leave. Don’t interfere with people’s incomes or you’ll end up finding the fuck out
Got it. The next time I stand on a private piece of grass that I paid 200 grand for the privilege of using, I should expect to be shot at like I deserve. I’ll keep that in mind.
When the owner of the property wants you to move on? Yeah. Move on. Or don’t and find out.
And I’m seriously wondering when Reddit got so bad that the hivemind supports calls for violence. Are these humans? Are they bots? Why does reddit allow this conduct?
Spez is a fascist, dude allowed nazi propaganda on his platform in the name of “free speech”. Users are disgusted by what’s on r/popular so the nazi population percentage grows. Add to this the complete eradication of mod tools and you get bots and extremists invasions.
If it wasn’t for reddit supporting /r/TheDonald, there is a good chance MAGA might not have ever happened, at least not in the way it manifested.
Trump was able to get a significance amount of grassroots support early on, and it almost all came from /r/TheDonald. This was before anything was really happening on other social media. People that were disenfranchised with Obama pretty much went with either Bernie or Trump. It was a warzone on Reddit. Both Bernie and Trump did AMA’s and this blew them up popularity wise.
What Bernie didn’t have that Trump did was an army of russian bots supporting him.
Nah, if you want to point at the thing that made all this happen…then its not MAGA.
it was Gamergate.
Gamergate was the prototype and test run for the foreign provocateurs, right wing extremists and other hate mongers to see how successful such a large scale attempt at manipulation of narratives and communities could be… and it proved quite successful, and the same tactics and methods were scaled up even further to lay the groundwork for Trumpism and what we have today.
Gamergate was the Trinity test that lead to Littleboy (general uptick in rightwing extremism/fascism/alt-rightism and approval of such) and FatMan (Russian “Useful Idiots” who came to power, or threatened to, with Russian backing, not just in America, but elsewhere)
I was so confused by gamergate.
you are very into something but the whole thing was so just, incoherent. Like I still don’t really get what gamergate was because it was like a Russian nesting doll of gaslighting.
idk, I disagree that /r/TheDonald’s existence was what sparked MAGA. Russia had such a heavy hand in the creation and support of MAGA that they would have found another place to start the fire. TheDonald was just the largest pile of kindle available… with many more around it. I could imagine they would have focused even harder on facebook, or news coverage or whatever else.
Regardless, I do agree with the rest of your point that TheDonald had a huge influence on MAGA
In hindsight it was pretty fucking obvious when TD was regularly inspiring terrorist attacks and was allowed to thrive while CTH got banned for saying 17th century slave owners deserve death
Imo, community-wise, reddit is on track to become another 9gag. Which is to say, a crypto fascist cesspool.
