this post was submitted on 29 Sep 2023
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Has the political spectrum on reddit shifted? (lemmy.world)
submitted 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
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Tl;dr: have there been any writings, surveys, or studies on the political composition of Reddit shifting in large communities?

I logged out of my reddit account a while ago but still browse some subreddits without logging in and have recently noticed more far-right rhetoric in general. I'm curious to know if others have seen this trend or, even better, wrote about it or documented it. Some examples I noticed were r/sweden and r/exmuslim. These are two communities I used to frequent often and both of them now have descended into more upvoted far-right rhetoric of the "deport them all!" caliber.

I have a feeling (from my own experience browsing these communities) that such content used to be quickly addressed and downvoted, and both of those subreddits don't tend to ban people on the fly nor overmoderate. Sometimes I see threads with the same title (likely posted by the same person) on both the subreddit and the corresponding lemmy community where the difference in opinion and the general political leaning is obvious.

So, not to succumb to my own biases, have there been any writings, surveys, or studies on the political composition of Reddit shifting in large communities?

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[โ€“] [email protected] 2 points 10 months ago

I still use Reddit, but I unsubbed from the world news, politics, etc. subreddits years ago for this reason. There has been a clear decline over the years, but I think a lot of this is artificial, especially anywhere focusing on political discussion. Anyone who can't tolerate talking like a propaganda bot shuts up or leaves or gets some kind of stockholm syndrome, because there are groups of activists who think they can achieve their goals by enforcing that. And to be clear I'm not saying this is just left wing activists, you could see the same sort of decay happening on 4chan for instance with right wing activists who have that same mindset.

But because it is artificial, so is the impression that everyone really thinks like a propaganda bot. Maybe some of them do, but I think for the most part they have just been conditioned to feel uncomfortable speaking in public spaces online without a lot of anxiety and attention on speaking the way the bots and activists have narrowly defined as acceptable. Any time you go to a private space, or a smaller, less popular space, there is a noticeable difference. So personally I think there is cause for hope.