alt Hacker NewsThere are huge influence operations basically on every national sub.
I found one on r/portugal, clearly coordinated network spreading political news of a certain persuasion.
R/donald became famous because the admins turned on national flags for users there revealing a significant percentage was Russian IPs without even a VPN. The Russian users called it “the mark of David” and compared it to Nazism.
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I’ve never heard of Reddit revealing the nationality of members of any sub. Do you have a source for this?
It's crazy for me that it's not a well-known thing that Russia, Iran, China, North Korea and other countries are fueling the polarization of western politics using bots on EVERY RELEVANT social media. The right wing bots are kind of known, but a lot of people aren't aware of other things (e.g., TENET Media [1]), or that they are fueling left wing circles as well [2].
People believe that these countries would love to do that, but for some reason, they think they are not doing as much as possible.
[1] https://arxiv.org/abs/2503.19802
[2] https://www.telegraph.co.uk/politics/2025/06/25/scottish-ind...
> There are huge influence operations basically on every national sub.
I believe you. But I've also often been accused of being a bot or working for an intelligence service when posting my own opinion in political discussions, not in coordination with anyone at all, and not pretending to be anything I'm not. I think the people accusing me of this did genuinely believe it too.
Have you got a source for the national flags claim? I'm not sure that is a feature on Reddit. Most subreddits have custom flairs and some will let you choose a flair for your country, but afaik Reddit mods can't autodetect a poster's country of origin.