8 upvotes, 1 direct replies (showing 1)
View submission: Suspected Campaign from Russia on Reddit
/u/worstnerd & crew, I appreciate your due diligence and hard work when isolating and finding these problems. However, you really, really need to check out /r/politics lately. There's been an influx of breitbart and other sites like it, spam. The accounts are almost always one to two days old, and always spam the same content which is right wing news orientation websites and they're always strangely quiet after the submissions. The mods of /r/politics refuse to do anything about it and refuse to acknowledge it.
Please look into it.
Comment by therealdanhill at 07/12/2019 at 00:21 UTC
3 upvotes, 0 direct replies
Hi there! So, firstly, what you are describing for the most part are chronic ban evaders who are aware that right-leaning submissions make some users upset, so they will continue to post them because they are assured a reaction. Eventually, when they are not able to use that account anymore, they will switch to another, oftentimes ones that have been deliberately aged. Please note that ban evasion is a problem on all subreddits and happens from all "sides", but of course you can understand we would get it worse as politics can be a divisive and motivating subject.
You will not see accounts that are 1-2 days old making submissions, as that is impossible, so if you are seeing that I would ask for an example to correct any issues, feel free to send it to us in modmail.
And also, there are legitimate users who post from those sites organically because those are the sites they prefer. Those users are more often than not reported to us as assured Russian trolls or bots, and when we do not ban them, we in turn are accused of harboring such activity.
Finally, I'd like to address our "refusal" to "do anything" or acknowledge anything. This is not the case, we have several measures in place to prevent the type of behavior you are referring to, no matter what "side" a user is participating in bad faith from. The vast, vast majority of our users do not break our rules, and our site has always been proactive in working with the admin team to make sure we're staying within sitewide guidelines, and reporting content to them that is suspicious, which I'm sure they would tell you were you to have an opportunity to ask.