Reddit admitted it has “found and removed a few hundred accounts” associated with Russian propaganda, one week after The Daily Beast confirmed the Kremlin-backed Internet Research Agency, or Troll Farm, used the platform during the 2016 presidential campaign. Reddit’s CEO Steve Huffman, writing under the username Spez, outlined both direct propaganda, such as troll accounts using the platform, and indirect propaganda, like subreddits such as r/The_Donald repeatedly linking to Russian Twitter troll account @TEN_GOP. “Given the recent news, we’d like to share some of what we’ve learned,” he wrote.
If you are a frequent visitor to Reddit this is not really news, since this was being called out during the election, but nothing was ever really done about it.
Like Facebook the moderators of Reddit seemed to ignore the problem altogether.
And that has really pissed off a number of Reddit users:
Reddit users rebelled en masse against the site’s CEO for concealing Russian troll activity the site now admits it knew about, and for not working fast enough to ban dangerous and extremist communities.
Reddit’s CEO Steve Huffman admitted the site has been targeted by at least “a few hundred” troll accounts in an announcement to Reddit users on Monday, four days after a Daily Beast investigation confirmed for the first time that Russia’s troll farm used the platform.
Reddit has not responded to repeated requests by The Daily Beast for comment about The Daily Beast’s investigation, which showed Russia’s Internet Research Agency used American proxies to access the site.
Based on that reporting, Senate investigators are looking into opening up probes on the troll farm’s use of Reddit and Tumblr, according to The Washington Post.
I only visited that r/The Donald subreddit a few times, but the stuff that was posted on there was outrageous, misleading, and consistently pro-Donald Trump.
Many of the talking points that you may have seen defending Trump during the election, or minimizing news stories about him, originated on these subreddits and then spread far and wide on Facebook, Twitter, and various other social media outlets.
By the way as of this post r/The Donald is still up and has over half a million subscribers.
Source http://ift.tt/2Het68U
