Content warning: This article contains numerous examples of bigoted rhetoric. Users on Reddit’s “r/conspiracy” forum have repeatedly and openly posted anti-LGBTQ content for years without pushback, despite the platform’s rules prohibiting “hate based on identity or vulnerability” and anti-LGBTQ “groomer” rhetoric. Reddit has a history of taking action against other subreddits that have violated those rules. A Media Matters review of r/conspiracy since May 2020 found a widespread pattern of anti-LGBTQ hate, which includes accusing the LGBTQ community of grooming, having “mental illness,” and associating with pedophilia.
Ever since covid subreddits either turned into r/the_donald or gender detectives and joe rogan circle jerks. It really got flooded with alt-right new accounts in the span of 3 years. Really weird.
??? … r/conspiracy has been overrun with right wing fake news since like 2015/16 at the very least.
It’s not really weird either, as that’s the time when the propaganda farms (FSB, Cambridge Analytica, etc) started their psychological warfare campaigns for Trump.
Conspiracy became full right wing propaganda quite a while ago. Pictures of Clinton with epstein would get a billion upvotes but there were never any ones of Trump despite him being more relevant
Conspiracy theories dovetail straight into the standard Russian agitprop playbook of “distrust your country’s authorities and institutions” which the right has picked up and sprinted with since 2008 or so.