http://i.imgur.com/fItaEy9.png
If you were a regular user at /r/politics, you would have noticed that there were tons of new users with no history coming in and throwing ad hominem attacks at everyone who said anything about clinton. You would also notice that bots were doing keyword searches on certain negtive titles and automatically downvoting them the instant they were posted. The day after the election was over, this all ended.
The Correct the Record PAC had 6 million dollars in funding specifically for spreading opinion on social media sites, of which Reddit is one of the most influential, being a source of long-form discussion. In fact, I believe CTR even directly mentioned that they target Reddit. Why wouldn't they, considering it was their stated mission?
What on earth do you think politicians do with their media budgets? Only buy newspaper and TV ads? Do you think they just ignore the internet, which is the number one form of media now? That's just plain absurd.
Then there was the narrative that the politics sub suddenly became more neutral after the election was over since CTR was no longer spending money, but if you check the sub now, it's still very anti-Trump, showing that the Sanders and Clinton support were organic.
https://www.opensecrets.org/pacs/lookup2.php?strID=C00578997
And we know their mission:
Correct The Record will invest more than $1 million into Barrier Breakers 2016 activities, including the more than tripling of its digital operation to engage in online messaging both for Secretary Clinton and to push back against attackers on social media platforms like Twitter, Facebook, Reddit, and Instagram. Barrier Breakers 2016 is a project of Correct The Record and the brainchild of David Brock, and the task force will be overseen by President of Correct The Record Brad Woodhouse and Digital Director Benjamin Fischbein. The task force staff’s backgrounds are as diverse as the community they will be engaging with and include former reporters, bloggers, public affairs specialists, designers, Ready for Hillary alumni, and Hillary super fans who have led groups similar to those with which the task force will organize.
http://correctrecord.org/barrier-breakers-2016-a-project-of-...
It it just a conspiracy?
A PAC that does "online messaging" on certain platforms isn't evidence of this grand conspiracy. Everyone does online messaging. You're claiming something far wackier is being done by one specific group of people that you singled out.
https://www.reddit.com/user/wardsalud/submitted/
There's a reason that account has been flagged for bot removal consistently. Their account consists of pro-Clinton articles every single day for months, lots of them upvoted and heavily-commented on. Yeah, there are some people who just don't have a life, but at some point you have to just start looking at evidence.
You just had to be on some of the reddits during the election season and you could literally see the tone change when the weekend would end.
We know the Clinton campaign did engage in a strategy of manipulating media attention (see Wikileaks). We don't know CTR is manipulating social media but we have a lot of reasons to suspect so.
At some point the burden of proof is on you.
2) People on Reddit and elsewhere noted pro-Trump videos with thousands of shares and a couple hundred views repeatedly. The only way that would happen is with bots since to trigger the share link on YouTube would be by viewing the video.
2) Yeah. Trump and Russia are doing it, too. It's just as nefarious there. Why is the standard defense of Clinton whataboutism?
I think the only way to combat accusations of whataboutism is to rigorously apply the same standards whenever these things are brought up and do one's best to remove even the appearance of partisanship when making them. That can be tough to do.
You know, stuff like this is actually where people can cross party lines and work together. Find an issue that should be non-partisan, set aside the other issues they may disagree on, and get something positive done.
Edit to add: I didn't think this was controversial. If you down vote, I'd appreciate it if you would take the time to comment in the interest of communication.
If I stab you and you try to defend yourself, it is whataboutism now?
Politics is about offense and defense. You can't fight a guy with bot networks pushing a false narrative without one of your own.
You honestly think unilateral disarmament is the way to go?
Having said, I think the above poster is correct that the idea of CTR taking over reddit as some settled reality is a sort of mass hysteria.
It is something that is simply repeated over and over again until people accept it.
Accepting anything without proof is strange and foolish.
This is interesting. Can you expand on this? Is it that CTR was involved? It sounds like the source(s) of the Twitter bots won't likely be found. What's the reach of reddit's /r/politics in comparison to Twitter?
"It's hard to know anymore who is genuine and who is a paid sock puppet in certain forums."
Isn't that the truth! Same goes increasingly for sources in general.
Also, evidence needed for "take over" as CTR messages would be labeled as such.
I swear, every time someone brings up twitter's political censorship, there's at least one comment to the effect of "they're allowed to!" or "if you don't like it, you can leave!". Yes, everyone knows! We're talking about the morality, outcome, or effectiveness of twitter doing such a thing, not whether or not they're entitled to do it.
There isn't a law that forbids people from gossiping about others behind their backs but most of us can generally agree that it's simply something that decent people should not do.
[1]https://www.opensecrets.org/pacs/lookup2.php?strID=C00578997