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What, if any pressure, has the current Whitehouse applied to Reddit, in regards to censorship?
Since it has recently been revealed that the Whitehouse pressures Facebook (and the FBI pressures FB as well), Twitter, Youtube into censoring American citizens, I wonder if similar pressure has been applied to Reddit.
Personally I don't believe it's all that needed on Reddit.
Years ago I noticed something interesting related to GMO products. You could be in the most obscure sub you could think of and if you just mentioned GMO is a negative light at all, suddenly you'd get a 3 page post citing 100's of "scientific papers" proving how safe, or even healing GMO meat was, how anti-science you were, how evil, how much of a Nazi, etc. Pretty much the exact same post no matter where you were, but different accounts (as far as I cared to look anyway). Then if you brought something up (e.g. "yea but literally all of those papers you cite are from GMO companies?") then you might get silence for a bit, then seemingly instantaneously all over the site there would be a package response to that. It was such a bizarre phenomena but it was really like Beetlejuice: say "GMO sucks!" and they would appear.
Then came the 2016 election. All of the mainstream news subs were pro Bernie and hostile to Hillary (and to Trump of course, though he had that crazy meme sub at that point). Then Hillary won the primary and I saw the exact same thing happen with Hillary. The same Beetlejuice affect. You could be in /r/rollerskatesforpeoplewith3legs and say "those are cool skates but they remind me of Hillary Clinton and she's just not likable" and out comes the canned posts with all the exact same message stated the exact same way (e.g. "Most qualified person to ever run for president"... uh, what about a president running for a second term, wouldn't they be more qualified?). Highly aggressive. But this time it wasn't one or two it could be dozens of people or more. What made it stand out to me was how fast and how radical this changed. The die hard "Bernie or nobody" people seemed to literally disappear. Of course they were there but suddenly they were downvoted to oblivion.
I personally think reddit these days is 80% bots and "call centres" making comments. So there's no need to censor the site directly, just put backroom restrictions on what the call centres and bots are allowed to push.
NOTE: The above is purely from memory and I'm a human so some of it won't have actually happened how I remember it now but I think it gets the point across of what I was seeing and why I have come to this conclusion.
The GMO might just be the fact that it's a part and part of the whole "I-fucking-love-science" technologist mindset (along with nuclear power, vaccination and some other similar topics, also discussed here) that's shared by a lot of nerds, which would tend to form an oversized share of Redditors, as they might be expected to do on online longform debate forums generally. I mean, I generally support nuclear power and vaccination, as well as GMOs, but I also readily recognize there are people who go beyond supporting them to making them shibboleth cure-alls for a variety of global problems with pretty much zero possible downsides, and who also readily search for perceived anti-technology heretics (hippies, conspiracy theorists, other general "Luddites") to struggle with; much of the COVID vaccination debate was fuelled by this, and it was obvious a lot of people supporting vaccine mandates did so not only or even primarily because they thought it would help fight COVID but also because it was a good way to punish those fucking idiot antivaxxers, a convenient online punching bag for years and years before Covid.
I mean, I wouldn't be surprised if there were also GMO company bots shilling their products online, but the general pro-GMO online atmosphere also creates a fertile soil (pun not intended) for that shilling to succeed.
I also encountered a GMO astroturf account on an low-traffic local sub -- I'm fairly sure it was a real person, and it did encourage organic response from IFLS types you describe -- but if you looked at the post history it was all "arguing about GMOs on obscure subreddits".
I'm shocked that anyone finds Reddit important enough to run this sort of op on, but I'm pretty convinced that some people are either paid to do it, or both organized and ideological enough as a group to spend time repeating talking points.
Another example -- I have it on reasonably credible authority that the youth wing of the Liberal Party of Canada distributes specific talking points which its members then astroturf on the national and provincial subs whenever there's a controversy; you can see this because it's usually some legalistic nitpick that's repeated word for word by different (legitimate seeming) user accounts to create the impression of "politics as usual, nothing to see here, Conservatives are just too dump to understand what's happening".
I doubt that the LPC can afford to hire Chinese bot/troll farms -- but they don't need to because they have a readymade group of youngsters who care enough to do it for free. The key is the coordination of responses to create the impression of a reasoned consensus; again I don't see this as worth doing, because Reddit's userbase is overwhelmingly aligned with Young Liberals anyways -- but somebody important enough to coordinate this appears to disagree.
I am open to the possibility that better-resourced actors do something similar with for-hire agencies -- although this does seem like something that would eventually come to light in the form of "I was a Reddit consensus-manufacturer, AMA" type exposes.
Running that sort of op might also just be to generate cohesion among the liberal party. Propaganda goes both ways.
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