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?

  • Astroturfed@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    I think the demographic of lemmy is more of the people that fled. Which means on average the site would of shifted a bit right and less in love with Linux. The few times I’ve poked my head in there the last couple months it’s been for sure less well moderated. Which means a lot more hate speech and right wing bullshit.