I highly recommend watching two videos..."The Dead Internet Theory", by All Time, and "Reddit is Being Manipulated by Professional Shills Every Day" by Point. They go into how Reddit works algorithmically, and how there is a strong incentive for corporations, governments, and political movements to write bots to manipulate karma. If hackernews lets me, I will link both of them and the darknet diaries episode. Im new here, so Im not sure how links work on ycombinator.
Darknet diaries 27: https://darknetdiaries.com/episode/27/
Dead Internet Theory: https://youtu.be/DEn758DVF9I
Reddit is run by shills: https://youtu.be/4uIrnEIuL8o
Reddit has no captchas whatsoever?
Is the kgb and it’s army of trolls not aware of Reddit?
Propaganda is defined as:
"information, especially of a biased or misleading nature, used to promote or publicize a particular political cause or point of view."
If we accept that as a definition, it is clear that everything that is biased (* and is misleading ) is propaganda ( and if you think for more than a second, you recognize that everything is indeed biased to a degree ). Now.. whether is it is misleading.. can be in the eye of the beholder.
<< and then 100,000 "actual users" [...] upvote
Believe it or not, people do have an interesting tendency to follow the wisdom of the crowd. As such, social sentiment is a valuable indicator of what they 'should think'.
Can it be called "propaganda" if it's just like, an r/worldnews link to a story on some website and then 100,000 "actual users" (I don't think they're all bots?) on their own volition/will/brainpower spread/support (upvote) the "pro-Ukraine" message in the comments?