Go check the UnitedKingdom subreddit if you want to see the celebratory bloodlust of the average Briton, the blatant alternative truths and so on, and this is of the young progressive sort, the average 40+ boomeroid probably no longer bothers with that mask even.
I am so tired. I've fought the good fight for so long for my people but in the end it's like it was all pointless.
As much as I'd like to think they are all Ivans and Vlads from Kamchatka doing this for 50 kopecks, I feel like there can't be that many and with such authenticity, dedicated so hard to that sub.
Like how important is demoralising the already inactive disengaged progresvives really to political power and who has so much time and resources?
The one thing AI LLMs seem to be actually quite good at is generating lots of quite 'real'/'genuine' sounding comments and replies, so it really could be bots. It probably doesn't actually take that much effort either in relative terms, if you decide you want to AstroTurf an online space.
It's a shame because it could basically kill discussion on the internet as we know it. It's mad to think it, but in a few years we could be telling younger generations of a time when we wrote words to each other online and it was reasonable to assume that we were talking to a real person...
There’s been a noticeable shift on r/UnitedKingdom since around the time of the Reddit protests. I no longer participate there but I’ve seen quite a bit of extra unpleasantness the few times of taken a curious look at it.
Not that it was ever a great place to discuss trans issues, but the nastiness seems to be spreading to all manner of topics now.
There may have been an organized effort by the far right to take over various national subreddits. It gives the impression that their views are overwhelmingly popular in the country, when really they're not. The subreddit /r/Canada also got dominated by the far right, which led to the creation of /r/onguardforthee. At least one of the mods of /r/Canada was shown to be an active neo-Nazi, and another declared himself a white supremacist. There is still too much support for the far right in Canada (and we're looking at a big lurch to the right in the next election), but it's not as dominant as you'd think from that subreddit.
Tbf, leftists did this also. r/northernireland had a big bunch of American IRA larpers who never set foot in the country, and edgy youth from the Republic.