WhatAmLemmy@lemmy.world: Hello from your friendly neighborhood antifascist! I’ve used redlib to keep tabs on the reddit mainstream narratives, ever since I abandoned accounts during the fascist pigboy API ratfuckery.
Th linked thread is a great example of corporate astroturfing against the left I’ve seen a thousand times before. After days of sustained anti-centrist threads, the most upvoted narrative in this one is pro-centrism, after an election where an anti-billionaire, anti-PAC, pro-M4A progressive candidate flipped the con stronghold of Texas by over 20 points. They’re now claiming Talarico isn’t a progressive/leftist, and that establishment centrist candidates “handpicked by Schumer” achieved the landslide. It’s pathetic, but it works for the uneducated and apolitical who don’t pay attention most of the time.
The most obvious indicator of reddit astroturfing has always been when a subs thread flips from the mean of that community, like back in 2020/21 when 9 of 10 threads in liberal subs about BLM were supportive of the protesters, but 1 of 10 flipped to demonizing them; filled with a bunch of troll comments and fash narratives rephrased a dozen times. Usually the astroturf threads will align narratives with those promoted across other social, conservative, and mainstream media.
Edit: also if you go through each username in that thread, a significant number appear to be karma farming accounts with several hundred thousand upvotes = accounts most likely to be owned by lobbyists, guerrilla marketers, and propaganda operatives.