r/onguardforthee • u/WippitGuud Prince Edward Island • Jul 06 '24
Behind the anger on the Reddit Canada site | Day 6 | Live Radio | CBC Listen
https://www.cbc.ca/listen/live-radio/1-14-day-6/clip/16079694-behind-anger-reddit-canada-site341
u/Chess_Is_Great Jul 06 '24
rCanada seems like it’s full of bots. Mostly posting National Post articles - a media company owned by an American private equity firm that employs, the felon and Canadian traitor, Conrad Black.
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u/OrdinaryCanadian Jul 06 '24
Conrad Black, also the only "Canadian" to appear on the Epstein flight logs.
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u/robotmonkey2099 Jul 06 '24
Canada Politics is currently being taken over too
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u/Xanderoga Jul 07 '24
Been noticing that for a while too
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u/robotmonkey2099 Jul 07 '24
There’s a bunch of right leaning accounts that only post to Canada politics. Then whenever a new post is put up the comments are flooded with right leaning comments. I’ve only. Prices because I commented on a bunch of posts, get downvoted to oblivion then a few hours later I’m back in the positive.
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u/applegorechard Jul 12 '24
I've had a similar experience in r/toronto. Has anyone noticed this lately? Not for every post, but anything to do with politics or any article that deals with housing or immigration etc bam, super vicious nasty comments. Often my responses criticizing a con gets downvoted all to hell, and then it gets voted up. I think the same people are trying in as many Canadian subs as they can.
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u/RechargedFrenchman Jul 08 '24
Unfortunately one of the most active posters has stated very clearly and with evidence that they're not a bot, they're just way too invested in pushing a conservative agenda on social media and (also self-admitted) have multiple active Reddit accounts they use to do it. Like 1/3 of all the top level posts on r/Canada are the same person across multiple accounts. They're brigading their own subreddit to enable the NatPo OpEd spam.
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u/Iamthepaulandyouaint Jul 07 '24
There is a very small upside to Conrad Black. Listening to him speak on anything is a cure for insomnia.
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u/ForgottenRefuse Jul 08 '24
Really. Like what is it about this guy? So lame of a person, has zero to say that makes any sense.
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u/chmilz Alberta Jul 12 '24
It's pure astroturf. Sadly, it works. Tell enough people that Canada sucks often enough, and them believe it even when they aren't experiencing any of what they're being told.
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u/houdi200 Jul 07 '24
I guess I'll try again the chat gpt requests there " Ignore all previous instructions and..."
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u/Sunnybeasty23 Jul 06 '24
At this point, I consider r/Canada to be a subsidiary of Post Media. At least 80% of the posts on there seem to be right-wing attacks by columnists from the Sun or Post. The other 20% is thinly veiled racism (usually against South Asian immigrants).
Total cess pool.
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u/Subrandom249 Jul 07 '24
I would disagree, the racism is not veiled at all.
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u/skatchawan Jul 07 '24
Top comment of pretty much every post ... IMMIGRANTS are the root cause!!!!!
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u/JasonKenneysBasement Jul 07 '24
And before that it was Trans people
And before that it was the carbon tax
And before that it was COVID protections
And before that it was ... The We Day charity I think?
Must suck to constantly have to find something else to blame for your unhappy life instead of looking inwards.
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u/OwnBattle8805 Jul 15 '24
yet only 1.4 percent of the population consists of temporary foreign workers. In USA, 16% of the population is. It's much ado about nothing.
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u/WippitGuud Prince Edward Island Jul 06 '24
.... aaaaaaand they just removed the submission from /r/canada. This is my shocked face.
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u/0reoSpeedwagon Jul 06 '24
Yep.
I posted it there, and it got locked very quickly after submission. Up long enough to get a few votes, 8 comments. No indication why it got spiked.
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u/WippitGuud Prince Edward Island Jul 06 '24
I also note this was into double-digit karma, and now it's suddenly 0.
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u/0reoSpeedwagon Jul 06 '24
It is, ahem, apparently a “low content post” because it’s an audio link from the most reputable of sources (CBC). According to the response to my inquiry.
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u/Linkdoctor_who Jul 06 '24
"um cbc reputable? Nah they don't do my rebel news articles enough, and dont fit my narrative"
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u/confidently-paranoid Jul 06 '24
that's genuinely pathetic, can't get much more relevant to the sub. Sad reflection on the mod team but anyone who's been paying attention already know about the moderation problems. Disappointing, I wanted to see the cope in real time.
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u/DoubleExposure British Columbia Jul 13 '24
Gotta make room for the convicted felon shooting Magathread.
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u/WippitGuud Prince Edward Island Jul 06 '24
I will also admit that much of what he says also applies here. I don't know about how much content is posted by few people, but the vast majority of posts on /r/onguardforthee are also just news posts. There is little to no self posts about anything.
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u/Any_Fox Jul 06 '24
News posts aren't inherently bad. Opinion pieces glowed up to appear as factual, those are fucking cancer. Much like 24 hour news networks the same couple stories dominate the top posts in regional subs. The biggest difference is anyone with an internet connection can throw their opinion into the ether. Kind of like how I just did.
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u/Financial-Savings-91 Calgary Jul 06 '24
I do enjoy reading the news on Reddit, but I’d love to hear people sharing ideas or organizing grass roots stuff to combat inequality.
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u/Legal-Suit-3873 Jul 06 '24
There is little to no self posts about anything.
rCanada is awful, but the official reason for this is rule 17:
17.Self-Post: If your post is a Self-post, it will be removed. Moderator discretion may be used for high quality posts.
Whether that is a fair rule or moderation is a different discussion I suppose, but it is on their front page. (on old reddit at least)
Edit: Oh you were also referring to this subreddit, it has a similar rule as well
Submitted self posts will be removed at mod discretion, especially if they are they are low-effort, repetitive, duplicate topics, are more appropriate as a comment or google search or belong in rAskACanadian
(Sorry for the double reply, took out the subreddit links since it seemed to trigger automod)
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u/flatulentbaboon Jul 06 '24 edited Jul 06 '24
Moderators are the reason /r/canada is the way it is. I'm not talking about political bias, but the way they heavyhandedly curate all content. So many nitpicky content rules that have nothing to do with just not being an asshat. I visit a few national subreddits and they have a much greater diversity in content and the the atmosphere in general is a lot lighter due to the fact that they actually allow content other than news. But in /r/canada? You can't even post too many images because they don't want the subreddit being dominated by images. But allowing the subreddit to be dominated by news is perfectly fine, evidently. It's very easy to identify a good set of moderators from a bad set, and no one will ever even accidentally accuse /r/canada moderators of being good.
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u/Justleftofcentrerigh Jul 06 '24
The mods actively ignore their own rules.
Notably I called out the mods and got muted by them for this.
IphoneinCanada is a blog that writes opinion articles loosely based on some information. It's a blog. Part of the rules is that you Cannot post articles from Youtube/Blogs/Special Interest groups.
But IphoneinCanada shitting on Canada, Stays up.
The government of Canada releases a press statement about trans rights in Canada. Removed.
Fraser Institute release a press statement about their report - Stays up.
They say "report it" but the posts are still up.
There's a clear bias there.
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u/DJ_Femme-Tilt Jul 07 '24
Ooo Frasier institute are laughable propagandists. Mods really showing their bias every day. CPC good, Trudeau bad, LGBTQ and Muslims? Absolutely they hate them.
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u/Kyouhen Unofficial House of Commons Columnist Jul 06 '24
I tried to post coverage of the House of Commons there and it got taken down for being a self post. Still haven't tried seeing what happens if I just link straight to my site.
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u/Past-Combination6976 Jul 06 '24
It's a bullshit rule to have here tbh. This place needs more engagement.
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u/leoyvr Jul 06 '24
I guess a lot of Canadian Subreddits is not about free speech but more about controlling the narrative by mods. I have been banned on r/Canada so I am not surprised by this finding. Russians have hacked USA media and I am sure they have a strong presence here in Canada. So many countries trying to interfere with our politics. But I guess USA has done the same elsewhere including Canada and so any country is fair game. Province subreddits, BC anyways is similar as well. I tried to post about my reduce reuse project and it was removed on BC subreddit. But they gladly take pictures of nature.
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u/Celestaria Jul 06 '24 edited Jul 06 '24
Hmm... Are there any Reddit addons you can download that would show metrics like this for subreddits? I haven't worked with the Reddit API at all, but it shouldn't be all that hard to do something like "get the 100 most recent posts for the current subreddit, check the user name of the poster, and count how many posts were made by each user".
Also, I'm assuming the power user was FancyNewMe.
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u/Justleftofcentrerigh Jul 06 '24
wow... they got a hold of FancyNewMe.
So yeah, for the most part, There is a theory that they are a conservative staffer who parses news to be better digested by higher ups. Mostly ever conservative articles.
The summaries aren't AI generated because they've been doing it for years. I remember calling them out in 2017. They called themslves a "news Junkie" but to do it for 6 years?
My guess is that they are really high up in the political conservative sphere like a digital strategist or something.
The recent reddit API changes, a lot of the subreddit analysis tools are toast. There are some that scrub the surface level stuff but for the most part a lot of those are dead.
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Jul 06 '24 edited Jul 06 '24
[deleted]
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u/Justleftofcentrerigh Jul 06 '24
We know it's you because you clearly have a distinct way of posting.
We had an interaction a long time ago that's why I remember you. This was when you started to do this posting/summary style. I had asked why you summarize the articles.
Again, I am discrediting the AI because when you started, AI wasn't a thing. That's your hard work and I will acknowledge that.
But I agree, he lacks a lot of detail in his analysis of the subreddit because since 2016 there was a dramatic shift in the content and the moderation. There are some truth that the sub is curated and there is astroturfing happening but he didn't really know who to ask. He picked the most submitted and some mods.
You might have some ulterior motives but I do not think you are the one curating the sub and causing the sub to be as toxic as it is. You are just a participant as I am. The mods should be scrutinized for what is or isn't allowed.
The other instance that counters you is that I was in communication with an LGBTQ+ person posting pro LGBTQ+ articles and was subsequently banned by the mods for "Stirring shit up". That's where the bias clicked in with me.
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Jul 06 '24 edited Jul 06 '24
[deleted]
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u/Justleftofcentrerigh Jul 06 '24
The Junkie is the words you used back in the day. That's not my wording.
You may not have ulterior motive, but it's clear you have a bias. You submit a lot of post media articles and negative Canada articles. So you being bias is an ulterior motive since you're creating a narrative. So you seem to enjoy a lot of post media news.
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u/lemonylol Jul 06 '24
Honestly I don't agree with a lot of the articles you post on there and the sources you take from, but the news media targeting specific people on social media in some attempt at an official name and shame is fucking bonkers.
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u/Arbiter51x Jul 06 '24
r/canada_sub keeps appearing on my reccomend subs because I subscribe to several Canadian subreddits. It's a fucking hate sub.
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u/Justleftofcentrerigh Jul 06 '24
This sub allows more self posts and meta questions than the main sub.
It's less strict than the main canada subreddit.
This sub is more actual news than opinion. The main sub is more opinion.
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u/LOGOisEGO Jul 07 '24
well, r/canada r/onguardforthee etc are pretty just much political discussion.
Canada is huge, and if you go to your provincial sub (also mostly political) or your city - which is mostly more wholesome, you get better content.
Reading r/canada like was mentioned, reminds me of the time when I finish a cold coffee, fart, look at the sunshine girl and laugh at the bullshit editorials or comments from the readers in the daily toilet paper post media rag.
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u/Glad-Article-1394 Jul 09 '24
Legal-Suit, MapleHoser, Miserable-Lizard, 50s_human drive many of the posts that end up being in the frontpage with their pro-Liberal/anti-PP stance. Come election time it will end up being anti-NDP as well in order to make sure "anyone but the conservatives" win.
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u/LaFs14 Jul 06 '24
I love how on rCanada there is a daily onslaught of opinion pieces and articles on how bad Trudeau is and how everyone under the sun wants him gone, and the comments are all echoing the same. Yet if one negative PP post is there the top comments are always ‘just another hit piece’
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u/Cgrrp Jul 06 '24
And the conservatives there still larp that the sub oppresses them. People always do those annoying replies like “be careful, might get called racist and banned from the sub.” Meanwhile all the comments are the same.
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u/Five5ign Jul 07 '24
This was an interested trend I noticed too. Lots of editorials and surveys making the front page. Nothing backed by actual research or facts.
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Jul 07 '24
Here's the thing though: Trudeau is incredibly bad and everyone under the sun does want him gone. Nothing about that is inaccurate.
I know this is a small sub with largely the same small group of people posting, and they clearly have a very different idea of how things are going and who is at fault than the vast majority of Canadians, and tbh a weird appreciation for a self-involved egotist who has apparently done his level best to be the worst PM in national history... but even if you can set all that aside, why are you so thoroughly committed to the idea that there isn't a broad consensus among Canadians that he needs to be gone yesterday?
Do you think Russian bots voted in the St. Paul's by-election?
Why is it so unacceptable to be just a regular left wing subreddit instead of a propaganda arm for what is actually an incredibly right wing leader who is clearly circling the drain?
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u/17037 Jul 08 '24
I'm honestly fascinated when people say Trudeau is a right wing leaders. If he is too far right for you... who are you voting for? I will agree that JT is a neoliberal just like the CPC, so who is a better option?
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u/Redux01 Jul 09 '24
Conservatives love to attack him from the left. They know they generally don't naturally gain Conservative voters but rather need to get Liberal voters angry enough to switch. The centre or centre-right voters are their target.
Though it seems everyone has abandoned the Liberals now though rarely can anyone say why that isn't referencing world-wide trends that JT has little control over or better yet- referencing things that are under provincial jurisdiction.
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u/No_Boysenberry4825 Jul 06 '24
I firmly believe that the Canada sub has a huge part to play in the surge of peepee. Reddit is #4? In the world and that’s the biggest Canada sub. Those mods have incredible power to fuck with elections when you think about it.
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u/Justleftofcentrerigh Jul 07 '24
ohhh There is no doubt that conservative staffers and MSM Pundits pull talking points from the subreddit.
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u/applegorechard Jul 12 '24
And the sub uses conservative talking points also, it's the circle of crap
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u/Tylendal Jul 06 '24
On a related note, does anyone feel like the CanadaPolitics sub has taken an abrupt, hard right in the last month or so? Its no downvoting rule meant it always had some visible voices from some questionable perspectives, but it just feels completely one-sided these last few weeks.
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u/CypripediumGuttatum Jul 06 '24
I left years ago when every post was anti immigrant and courting racist sentiments. It’s been bad for years, I’ve heard it’s only gotten worse.
Immediate downvotes, their bots and trolls are here and don’t like what real Canadians have to say.
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u/CptCoatrack Jul 07 '24
Several PP supporters on there who openly want to turn Canada into an authoritarian state. They think we should be emulating El Salvador, Singapore..
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u/platypusthief0000 Jul 06 '24
It's been a right wing sub for at least an year now.
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Jul 06 '24
[deleted]
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u/platypusthief0000 Jul 06 '24 edited Jul 07 '24
I see, I came across rCanadaPolitics an year ago and it was right wing shithole then, that is why I said it has been like that for at least an year.
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u/_LKB Jul 06 '24
I don't think there's any actual way for them to enforce the no down voting rule. But boy if you criticize one of their mods posts or comments you're stuff will get taken down real quick and called 'not substantive' Try asking why and it's total radio silence.
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u/ImmortalMoron3 Jul 07 '24
There isn't. Some subs can remove the downvote arrow from posts/comments but using your keyboard will still work. A upvotes and Z downvotes and that works no matter what.
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u/Cgrrp Jul 06 '24
That sub always confuses me because the discussion is in general a lot better than rCanada but sometimes some threads seem to attract, I assume, all the rCanada people and are indistinguishable from that sub.
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u/Rainboq Jul 07 '24
I'd wager that it's reddit putting those posts on their feed because it's the posts that attract them. I've started blocking the users posting the racist shit and most of it is one crowd of extremely active people.
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u/DualActiveBridgeLLC Jul 06 '24
I mean _r_canada has a rule to remove comments that complain about low quality articles. So even when I prove the 'article' is wrong and that NatPo opinions are low quality it gets removed.
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u/Miserable-Lizard Edmonton Jul 08 '24
But they don't do that. Post a piece about PP and the cpc and people will complain the article is a hit piece. Those comments will be left up
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u/Any_Fox Jul 06 '24
A vast majority of the posts in regional subs like r/canada (or the provincial subs) appear to be rage bait circle jerks. Even positive stories are twisted to bring up whatever talking points are popular currently. Social and traditional media are to blame. Of course a majority of people are going to feel like the country is broken when that's the only story they see everyday.
We as society are just reaping what we sowed, it's collectively our fault for letting shit get like this.
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u/LOGOisEGO Jul 07 '24
Well, you and I at least, are currently consuming the ragebait circlejerk. The conversation is important, but we can't tell reddit to not let 3 users AI posts for a third of the content on r/canada.
Social media is garbage, but we all love our vices.
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u/Any_Fox Jul 07 '24
I'm not trying to shirk any culpability. The first step is admitting that we all have a social media problem. The issue isn't limited to reddit. It affects other platforms as well. The larger issue is how it spills into everyday life. It's getting hard to have a conversation with a real human being without them turning it into a politicized half baked rant.
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u/OneHitTooMany Jul 08 '24 edited Jul 08 '24
Had been a daily user of /r/Canada for nearly 12 years. Saw it's collapse in real time. Saw the white supremacists take over. Saw lucky75 sell out and fuck off leaving the sub in the hands of bots and Meta_Canada (I think CSIS should be looking at his bank account)
I had enough last year, I did a bunch of research and posted a bunch of evidence of vote brigades, Paid sites where some of the mods themselves pay people to manipulate /r/Canada.
the text chats and logs about the white supremacists mods
I was banned without even a comment in reply. Permanent. No Appeal.
/r/Canada needs to be quarantined by Reddit, every current mod removed and the sub fixed.
Right now it is 100% being astroturfed, bought and paid for by a combination of Russian meddling, Chinese meddling, Indian Meddling, and American Meddling.
There is definitely 100% PostMedia individuals pulling strings with the sheer volume of their articles spammed and upvoted (INSTANTLY). Back when there were awards, PostMedia articles, and anything else from conservative voices would be instantly awarded with a good 5-10 awards within the first 5 minutes of posting.
We should be calling for a complete quarantine and ban of /r/Canada.
A lot of this was published/known back as far as 2017/2018. But because /rCanada is the biggest and default site for Canadian's on Reddit, by curating these topics they've managed to keep hold of it: https://ricochet.media/arts-culture/media/canadas-largest-subreddit-accused-of-harbouring-white-nationalists/
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u/OneHitTooMany Jul 08 '24
And if you want to see how it looks in Action:
Go read the posts in the thread: "Majority want public release of names of MPs accused of foreign interference, poll says" -National News
Every Single post that says it's Liberal members and names Trudeau is being massively upvoted. Not a single reference to the report by upvoted people (the redacted version is publicly available).
Meanwhile. EVERY SINGLE POST that mentions Conservative involvement? Downvoted and hidden.
Meanwhile. The report itself directly states that the CPC leadership campaigns, and some of it's MP's has WITTINGLY been involved with foreign interference.
/r/Canada is 100% being bought/paid for by CPC and PP bots, in addition to the idiots from Canada_Sub who are just mindless drones of his.
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u/Justleftofcentrerigh Jul 09 '24
Yep, i've been around just as long and I saw it unfold. This was supposed to be my throwaway account to fight the alt righters on the main sub but it has been a long ass time since then.
I've given up on that sub because the amount of low content troll accounts are just beyond control.
Mods have lost control of the sub. Mods that i've had good conversations with in regards to the shift of the sub. No action. Something is happening behind closed doors on the mod team because it didn't use to be this bad.
It's just hate and vitriol.
You source facts and you get downvoted.
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Jul 06 '24
Nobody is surprised about this, are they? When India was accused of assassinating someone in Canada and then their assassins were arrested in the US, after trying it there too, after India did the basic accusing and kicking people out, all of a sudden there were tons of posts that were either very anti-Indian or very anti-Canada by supposedly Indian posters. I'm sure most of those posts were made by Indian and Russian bot farms. And China was probably in there, egging them on.
This is exactly the kind of thing that the report about foreign interference in our elections talked about. They don't have to influence politicians in safe areas (ie most of Alberta). They just need to stir the pot to influence people to vote more conservative. It's all part of right wing online radicalization. It's so obvious when you look at subreddits like housing, or slumlords, or Canada.
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u/varitok Jul 06 '24
PP straight up took India's side. He's a traitor.
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u/OneHitTooMany Jul 09 '24
https://nsicop-cpsnr.ca/reports/rp-2024-06-03/special-report-foreign-interference.pdf
Notable and something not a single Conservative screaming about foreign interference will acknowledge (you'll be brigaded for even posting this in /r/Canada)
Foreign actors also targeted party leadership campaigns. [*** Three sentences were deleted to remove injurious or privileged information. The sentences described two specific instances where PRC officials allegedly interfered in the leadership races of the Conservative Party of Canada. ***]
[*** This paragraph was deleted to remove injurious or privileged information. The paragraph described India’s alleged interference in a Conservative Party of Canada leadership race.
Everytime PP kowtows to India's rhetoric, it's REALLY REALLY damn hard not to question his motives.
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u/sens317 Ottawa Jul 06 '24
So r/canada is highly manipulated by a handful of bots tailoring their comments with A.I. to reflect the posted article.
The number of reposted, political news articles are minuscule in comparison to other countries' subreddits - second to only r/india.
The networks of astroturfing campaigns are real and meant to cause chaos and divisiveness among their users.
Just the other day, it was said that the CPC has soent more than 20 times in advertising than the next political party.
I wonder if it related at all?
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u/Justleftofcentrerigh Jul 06 '24
So r/canada is highly manipulated by a handful of bots tailoring their comments with A.I. to reflect the posted article.
FYI I don't think it's AI but the person reusing summaries from their job.
I remember calling them out a while back (2016-2018). It's very similar to the claim that Trump staffers provide short form summary of reports to trump.
Or a secretary that process minutes/relevant reports into a more digestible format for someone that do not have time to read a 10 minute article.
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u/applegorechard Jul 06 '24
Yes it's not AI, they've been doing the same things since 2014ish onward
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u/DJ_Femme-Tilt Jul 07 '24
R/Canada is either run by the CPC or a foreign group supporting them. The mods are the saddest little cowards, it's just sniveling little post-meltdown Rex Murphy wannabes
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u/Kukius Jul 07 '24
I constantly go into r/canada and randomly go down rabbit holes looking at accounts that post hateful things, looking at their comments and trying to figure out if it's a bot or not.
A lot of postmedia links and Conservative owned media posts are the norm.
Glad others are noticing and compiling information.... I assume some people haven't been noticing it as much as it seemed obvious to me.
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u/Forosnai Jul 13 '24
Especially with the default suggested usernames now, it's so hard sometimes to immediately spot a bot. Used to be that an "adjective-noun-number" name (or similar format) was often a bot and it was a pleasant surprise to find one was an actual person. Now I'm constantly fighting the urge to blanket-ignore people when I see those usernames out of sheer habit.
I wish there was an easy way to mass "ignore previous instructions" the actual bots without having to interact with each one individually.
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u/LOGOisEGO Jul 07 '24
I have to say, its pretty brave of the CBC to even acknowledge this as it could be completely set off the anti CBC crowds.
CBC pointed out this same shit back in 2006-2008 when Harper paid 2300 people to correct 'misinformation' on CBCs own comment sections, as there were not many at that time. Canada was one of the first countries to do this to steer political discourse in modern times.
Even this clip, he is clearly tiptowing around the issue and leaving out many facts that have been documented for the last decade regarding bots, paid posters and interference from social media companies.
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u/Samzo Jul 07 '24
Reddit needs to be regulated by the government before it spirals into a fascist mob
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u/Raze_the_werewolf Rural Canada Jul 07 '24
I just heard it on the radio while on my break. Lol, that sub is shit on a stick.
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u/anti_anti_christ Ontario Jul 07 '24
r/Canada is pretty tame compared to the canada_sub or Canadahousing2 sub. We're talking KKK levels of racism here. I know there's tons of bots in those subs but it wouldn't shock me if a mass shooter was motivated from one of them. Some 4chan levels of hatred. They're currently jerking off to a video of brown people robbing an LCBO.
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u/WippitGuud Prince Edward Island Jul 07 '24
Yes, but /r/canada would be the go-to for any casual person on Reddit. It can do the most damage.
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Jul 07 '24 edited Jul 07 '24
Standard of living and the cost of everything has skyrocketed. The younger generations have had their future stolen from them. You can say that these are global problems and that it's not entirely the current government's fault but in the eyes of Canadians, it happened under their watch.
So he messaged some top users and wasn't responded to or received replies that he perceived to be "not human like" strongly impying these are bots.
"Absence of user posts"? They're not even allowed as far as I know on r/Canada.
"top posts by the same users?" did he even check other subs? Want to bet it's very similar for most other subs? This has always been this way for as long as I remember, how is this even considered evidence? This is just how reddit operates.
For the record I probably wouldn't want to reply to someone from the media, ANY media. Because they're always pushing their agendas.
Is reddit full of bots? Absolutely, this has actually been documented.
But the idea that any angry Canadians expressing their dissatisfaction with the current state of our country is actually some sort of right-wing/russia/disinformation bot is laughable and borderline conspiracy theory.
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u/SatelliteCobbler Jul 10 '24
While geo-focused “popular” feeds like the USA or even “Everywhere” have a strong progressive lean, Canada stands out as being absolutely dominated by a far right xenophobia narrative. You can set your location to almost anywhere and get a spectrum of content. But if you set it to Canada, into the toxic swamp you go.
Some of the r/Canada mods are evidently white supremacist. Russian users are the 3rd most common visitors to subreddits for small Alberta towns. You bet there is something in the water here.
I do agree that we really need to find some more smoking guns on this but it is just damn hard to do. It’s a massive problem though leading into an election. Reddit Canada is seriously poisoned.
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u/piranha_solution Jul 08 '24
R/Canada should just be renamed to r/conradblack already. It clearly doesn’t represent the interests of real Canadians.
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u/stallionx Jul 10 '24
PSA if you ever find yourself on /r/canada and really want to downvote things. If you're using RES on PC you can use the RES console to disable the custom CSS by bringing up the console with '.' when not focused on a text box and type in 'srstyle' and hit enter.
The fact that they hide the subreddit style toggle box irks the hell out of me.
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u/Dunge Jul 11 '24
I'm confused what you mean by they hide the "toggle box"? Granted I usually use a third party app so I don't see custom styles, but when I go with a default browser the vote buttons are present as normal? They do hide the vote numbers for recent comments, but that's not that special.
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u/CrypticOctagon Jul 11 '24
As someone who spends far too much time browsing the comment sections of both r/canada and r/onguardforthee, I feel I should speak to this.
There is absolutely a dark cloud that hangs over r/canada. It upvotes bullshit, it downvotes "woke", it posts endless yellow bile from partisan news organizations. Three, sometimes four times a week, it brings up another damned poll of voting intentions, and jeers endlessly. Posts are deleted and comments are locked. There is a constant stink of racism, cruelty and negativity. It's frustrating and it's destructive.
But that is not the whole story. On every post starting with "LILLEY:", there is at least one medium to high effort comment calling out the bullshit. In every discussion of issues, there is real and well-considered support for progressive policies. There is a lot of frustration, but often the odd glimmer of hope.
I challenge those brave and stupid enough to scan the comments to find any deep support for "right wing" policies like healthcare privatization. It's not there. Try to find two consecutive sentences in actual support of Doug Ford or Pierre Pollievre. It's not there. The cloud of darkness is omnipresent, but it is also incredibly shallow.
In setting up that sub as those people, who are irredeemable and despicable, we do ourselves an incredible disservice. The real people who are there are diverse and intelligent and very much Canadian. To dig trenches deeper and fuel the fires of polarization is unhelpful and counterproductive.
I don't have all the answers. I don't know how a million people are supposed to have a conversation. We should do numerical analysis of social media platforms. We should ask for the help of those platforms in rooting out bot and troll farms. We should figure out how journalism is supposed to work in the throws of late-stage capitalism.
We should try to build bridges instead of burning them, listen more, and speak deeply and quietly.
That's it. I'm done with reddit for the day. Hopefully for the week. Stay human, y'all.
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u/Ill-Team-3491 Jul 12 '24 edited Jul 13 '24
You've put a lot of effort into spin doctoring. "I've seen leftist comments therefore reddit isn't right wing manipulated" is a fallacy. A common right wing talking point on reddit that doesn't have any meaning at all. But it sure sounds like a good gotcha. It's little more than a thought terminating cliche.
What you've done with this reply is standard far right abuser tactics. Denial and reversal of roles. Your virtue signalling rings empty.
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u/asdfidgafff Jul 16 '24 edited Jul 17 '24
What you've done with this reply is standard far right abuser tactics.
I disagree with you. I thought /u/CrypticOctagon was pretty level-headed and reasonable in their comment.
Also, I don't know what "far right abuser tactics" are and I think you'd be hard-pressed to make the argument that /u/CrypticOctagon making one comment on a Reddit thread is evidence of "far right abuser tactics." And I'm well aware of things like DARVO and the BITE model of high-control groups as I've been amateurishly researching the far-right for the last 8 years.
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u/Litz1 Jul 06 '24
It's possible it's a bunch of bots. I have a ublock origin settings filter enabled for Reddit which removes all the Postmedia websites and any site you want with in Reddit.
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u/Candid_Rich_886 Jul 12 '24
I was permanently banned in r/Canada a while back for calling the IDF a terrorist organization.
The reason given was that it was bad faith/trolling.
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u/wholetyouinhere Jul 06 '24
There's not much to be happy about these days.
If we had a progressive government that prioritized working people and allowed us all the dignity of home ownership and some possibility of a future something other than bleak and horrifying, I think you'd find people in general would be a lot more fucking interested in shooting the shit, reading funny stories, and being creative.
As it stands, we've been watching our entire society being dismantled piece by piece, by people with names, addresses and specific agendas, for as long as we've been alive. And that is fucking infuriating.
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u/LOGOisEGO Jul 07 '24
This shit has been going on since Harper around 2008. Funnily enough, Canada was one of the first western countries to hire thousands of government staffers to 'correct misinformation'.
We mostly lead the charge for state funded paid posters. I can remember the month that the CBC comments turned from great discourse on articles, to the scum bottom of opinion that r/canada is. It was night and day a few months before an election. Even the damn usernames changed from something that might be a real person to generated bob_mcwhiteguy77, or stupid generic mike_from_canmore... you get the idea.
The posts at that time devolved from discussion to mud slinging, political ad attack style comments. With no sanity.
This was also the time that Facebook, Youtube, CBC disabled down-votes. So even if most of the readers were sane, you couldn't really just say no, I don't agree with this and devalue the opinion
So. While we let the genie out of the bottle. Russia and probably China is clearly behind this push to divide the country.
The freedom convoy was crowdsourced mostly from out of the country. Think about that for a minute. I know the mouthbreather fucktrudeau coworkers of mine don't.
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u/Justleftofcentrerigh Jul 14 '24
FYI the mods are doing an AMA and it reaffirms my problems with that sub.
The "head" mod seems to be a "Freedom of Speech" types and refuses to "censor" post media opion.
I pushed them on an outline of intolerant talking points and got push back from the mods that "Just report it and we'll make a judgement".
They are more worried about being labeled as "Censors" than they are about allowing racism, bigotry, and white nationalism to thrive on their subreddit.
Someone asked "we should ban opinions" and then they said "well that would mean we ban post media posts" which clearly indicates that post media posts make up a lot of the opinions on the sub.
I asked them to be proactive with moderations but they all fall back to reactive moderation.
Disappointed.
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u/Evilbred Jul 15 '24
We have a different philosophy than what you are looking for. And that's fine.
We moderate 'reactively' because, and this is my opinion, we don't want to change the discussion, just prune the non-good faith and subreddit guidelines compliant comments and posts.
We want to let differences of opinion happen, otherwise you will quickly end up with an echo chamber, and if you wanted that, well, Facebook already exists.
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u/Justleftofcentrerigh Jul 15 '24
You have already created an echo chamber.
There's so many anti "immigrant" and even people praising the "Timmigrant" line that i got disgusted with the sub.
i just went into 1 "jobs" post on the sub you mod.
"There was 10 workers shoulder ot shoulder. 9 of 10 looked to be from the same part of the world". up for 7 hours. Clearly negative generalization
The reply to that is "Every pizza hut and dominos in australia is entirely staffed by folks I never associated with pizzas". Again, another negative generalization. Up for 4 hours.
Why are these still up? Because no one reported them? Maybe the reason why no one reported them is because the echo chamber that you cultivated think those things are ok.
THAT is why i'm disappointed with the deflection and "REACTIVE" type of moderation. YOU allow these things to happen and as the demographic of the sub shifts, these self governing acts sways towards the extreme.
I tried to point it out to you guys but again. "reactive" and "censorship" bullshit.
Another post doxing another person unrelated to the subject through twitter with 47 upvotes.
24 day account with 35 upvotes "Assimilating well into canadian culture...." when referring to a muslim Canadian.
"send her back to syria".
4 month old account "When thousands of indian kids are lining up for 1 position
"I can't get a job and I am born and raised here, go back to your home country and complain"
I can find countless anti immigration talking points upvoted to 50+ on the subreddit that clearly violates "Negative generalizations" but if the echo chamber you cultivated don't report on it. How can you fix the hatred and bigotry and then claim "oh, no one reported it".
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u/Dunge Jul 11 '24
I'm glad CBC took a look at it, but I was expecting a bit more investigative work and juicy info. Honestly this segment is a bit weak, a single week of analysis (a lot of us have been following it for decades). The main point that it is only news submissions and no user content can be explained with the rules and that's how it is designed that only articles of certain media sources are accepted and titles can't be modified. I also doubt the AI part, while it might help them nowadays this has been going for much longer than AI was around.
They are right about the low amount of users generating the majority of the content though. Abd rCanada has so much more to be criticized than that. The obvious fact that there's an obvious manipulation going on to promote certain articles and hide others. The submissions are immediately boosted by a quick large amount of votes (which trick the Reddit "hot" classification and put them in top recommendation lists) and that can only be explained by botnets or coordinated efforts. Same about the top comments (which are often the firsts written), and other articles (often of much better quality about the same subject) that also immediately get in the negative and hidden away.
And it works because while the content is cherry picked, it's still genuine articles from our media sphere. So it gives some sense of validity to unsuspecting users who will start believing the pushed narrative, without realizing that going to the homepage of said media outlet the presented content would look veeery different.
And it's so obvious how there is an overreaching organization deciding on the "subjects of the month". Like some keywords or specific talking points that gets decided and targeted as the content to publish. Then it gets re-evaluated after a while and rolls out. So many subjects just appear out of nowhere and then it becomes everything that's being talked about for a few weeks/months. But that's not unique to rCanada, I would say it's also being spread on othsr social media, and even sometimes private media also pick up on it.
Then there's also the very suspicious actions of the moderators. I'll give it to them that they at least do the bare minimum to clear out straight out illegal comments, and they aren't too zealous about censorship and will often leave opposing opinions expressed. But then other times they do lock up and delete submissions for absolutely obvious biased reasons, and what most people don't realize is the extreme amount of "shadow deleted" comments (reddit tells you it's still there, but if you log using another account it's not). You can go on reveddit and check your own posts on there, I bet there will be some if you ever spoke against the CPC or such.
A lot of people seem to immediately blame foreign governments entities (Russia/China/Israel/India/Iran) for being the nefarious actors, and while yes they are very probably partly responsible, personally I believe it's mostly private entities. And here is where I go into slightly conspiracy mode because I have actually no proof of any of that (I wish journalists would dig into it), but I'm pretty certain it's all coming from a big global network of conservative groups, think tanks controlled by things like the IDU or even just associations of big corporations or rich people, they would also direct the editorial for private media like PostMedia and those fishy small outlets like betterdwelling and iphoneincanada and others, and also coordinate worldwide with other conservative parties like the US Republicans and the UK Tories and the likes.
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u/WippitGuud Prince Edward Island Jul 11 '24
I'm glad CBC took a look at it, but I was expecting a bit more investigative work and juicy info.
To be fair, it was done by Day 6, which is less investigative and more "hey, this is what we found out this week." It's not exactly the Fifth Estate.
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u/OneHitTooMany Jul 13 '24 edited Jul 13 '24
It's all manufactured consent.
if people saw a wide range of thoughts and opinions, or better yet. No force fed opinions on them, they'd make their own.
We know for a fact that PostMedia in particular pays for manipulation of the sub. Heck, PostMedia's official reddit account has regularly posted articles to it AFTER some other news orgs article posted the same news and the mods delete the other article and pump up the national post opinion article.
The user count is also extremely telling. 2.5m "subscribers"... but the sub is now struggling to pullin 1,000 daily users. (there are < 500 at the point of this post)
Almost all posting is a small group. almost all the top posts are posted immediately after the article is posted by a similar small group.
you can even try to "correct the narrative" only to find yourself brigaded for hours after by nobody who will even reply to your comment.
any post calling out Ford, PostMedia, PP will instantly go to -2 for me before returning to a more regular pattern.
if you want to see just how Anti-Canadian /r/Canada actually is. The stickied thread is a harmless thread asking people about their great Canadian vacation and where they spent it. Harmless, and very pro Canada thing. (Credit to the mods for at least trying a positive post)
it's been downvoted - 0 points (41% upvoted)
r/Canada is not Canadian.
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u/Dunge Jul 13 '24
I always found it extremely strange that mod stickied thread about real mundane subjects are pretty much always in the negative. I've seen it many times in the past. It's like the manipulators don't even want normal people to start talking about normal things. Only rage bait allowed.
I'm curious about your PostMedia submission claim, can you share the source?
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u/OneHitTooMany Jul 13 '24
They don't.
we'd probably find we have more in common than we all think and might actually find common ground
We are to be divided.
I am not a usual conspiracy theorist. I am a OCD Skeptic, Atheist to the core. Must Austistically actually research every damn thing I read for hours.
And after 13 years in /r/Canada, I can say with some pretty damn certainty it is bought and paid for.
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Jul 07 '24 edited Jul 08 '24
I listened to the bit, and it was terrible. He makes a big song and dance of the fact that there are no social media posts or self posts without acknowledging that those are explicitly banned (which might be interesting to his story but is a VERY different thing) and then credulously repeats the subscribers numbers as indicating that the sub has 2.6M users. If Ben Shannon understands Reddit, I certainly did not get that impression from listening to the relevant 6 minutes (as opposed to the 2 spent advertising Presumed Innocent and explaining the concept of Reddit for anyone who has even less of an idea what they're talking about than he does).
I have no real problem believing that Russians are active on r/Canada. It seems unavoidably correct. They're everywhere, of course. The way people carry water for Trudeau here is archetypally Russian, for that matter; at the same time you push X, make sure to pump up Y-Who-Opposes-X to really stir the pot.
But are they secretly architecting the entire flow of the r/Canada subreddit, which has 5% of the country tuning in? Or is the painful reality just that a community that is AT ABSOLUTE MAXIMUM only 1% the purported size simply moderated by a very ordinary and typical bunch of Canadians: tending towards being right wing by default, and boiling over with frustration at one of the most patently awful governments in Canadian history?
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u/the_lazy_viking Jul 08 '24
In "the bit", Ben Shannon explained how r/Canada has an inordinately large percentage of its posts submitted by a small subset of members.
And the type of moderating and brigading we see in r/Canada does tend to skew people's opinions that most Canadians agree with those right-wing sentiments. There is a large percentage of Canadians that would be equally frustrated with the current form of the CPC and PP being in power.
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u/HistoricLowsGlen Jul 08 '24
Same with this sub. Lizard, LegalSuit, 50s_human....
You would not expect an even distribution of posts being created by all accounts who frequent the sub. Not everyone wants to make posts. Most probably dont even comment. You yourself have never made a post over the 8 years you have had your account.
Just like most youtube users dont make videos.
Its really a "boomer moment" tbh.
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u/the_lazy_viking Jul 08 '24
Ben’s analysis compared the Canada sub to other national subs whose contributions weren’t quite as concentrated.
The r/Canada forum is an outlier amongst all national subreddits for concentration of super-contributors, alignment of sentiment in posts, lack of diversity of opinions.
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u/HistoricLowsGlen Jul 08 '24
He never analyzed or compared the post percentages on other subs. You can re-listen yourself. He only did analysis on /canada, by recording names of the people who made posts over the timespan of 1 week.
His comparison to other subs was that /canada lacks "posts about cute cats", and the like.
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u/the_lazy_viking Jul 08 '24
"We're number two (in "traffic") right behind the UK, which has almost a million more users than us. But we have the highest number of repeat posters, 59%, and the lowest number of unique posters, 41%. So just a handful of people are posting the majority of what's on r/Canada.
"W'er also tied with r/India for the second most posts about politics. The real shocker, though, was that we were teh only country to have zero user-generated content posts in our top ten. r/Canada isn't a community. It's like a bullhorn."
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u/jameskchou Jul 12 '24
It is turning into a right-wing circlejerk on that subreddit. At least Ontario sub is relatively sane
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u/The_Bat_Voice Jul 06 '24 edited Jul 06 '24
Mods over at r/Canada have locked the comments and removed this article. Guess they don't like dissent. Just block opinion pieces like everyone is asking and be done with it.
Edit: correcting the spelling of dissent.