From my experience, they have been astroturfed quite a lot, its' been that way for a while.

During the Laquan McDonald innocent and trial there were tons of accounts from the_donald, and not-connected to that were pretending to be experts and live in chicago (despite not having history on the sub). In the threads these accounts weren't positively contributing to the conversation, they were spewing:

1. Direct racial slurs 2. Political proganda criticising leadership they didn't like (not having direct experience and not critiqing direct political actions that lead to the event). I.e. "Chicago is a warzone"/etc. 3. Maliciously bad faith arguements. (Non-regulars steering up arguments to push talking points.. these weren't well intention-ed factual/communicative debates)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murder_of_Laquan_McDonald

Since then: There have been heavy agenda pushing on subs. For example scooters and bikes, after the introduction of rentable ebikes and scooters.. there was heavy votes and arguements over people who criticized the business and users behavior. (When the scooters were added to the city, there were lots of posts about destroying them.. now there are not recognizable accounts arguing and attacking you if you comment on this.. a comment about defending yourself against someone riding aggressively near you gets you site wide banned). Note: the attacks in support for scooters aren't consistent.. sometimes you get breakthroughs talking about the negative impact.

On r/privacy, there are groups of people that grief others about "well you can't do anything about this". I'm not talking about people expressing how they feel, I'm talking about direct denialism and griefing in a sub that is expressly meant to be pro-privacy.

Additionally, the DNC did this on r/wisconsin in 2024. They even used social manipulation tactics with calls to actions that "we must do something." There was documentation about this was coordinated efforts.

This has been documented on accounts that are necro-ing old posts for product recommendations as well.

Theres a lot that is claimed on the Ellen Pao == hitler drama actually being a Spez lead campaign in a business lead fight. (Turns out it was spez that wanted to roll out a lot of the restrictive features and sub removals, and Pao was more of a "let's be less resirictive and socially moderated" )

https://reddit.com/r/OutOfTheLoop/comments/2zcbyq/what_is_go...