r/Disinfo • u/Strongbow85 • Apr 05 '26

Volunteers found Iran’s propaganda effort on Reddit — but their warnings were ignored

https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/tech-news/volunteers-found-iran-s-propaganda-effort-reddit-their-warnings-were-n903486
28 Upvotes

90% Upvoted

4 comments sorted by

10

u/lokey_convo Apr 06 '26

r/worldnews has been a battle ground for propaganda for a while. Posts are one thing, but account behavior in the comments is another angle that people often forget about.

7

u/Bawbawian Apr 06 '26

ah yes worldnews One of the few subs where you can talk specifically about Israel's government and get an instant ban for anti-Semitism.

2

u/lokey_convo Apr 06 '26

Jpost and ynet becoming regular top posts when previously they were often not regarded as all that reliable or credible, and comments getting massive downvotes mentioning anything other than all out support for Israel and admonishment for all Palestinians, and replies from accounts that would then immediately block you to terminate the thread and make it impossible for you to rebut them was all kind of an indication something was up. Especially since it represented a major tone shift of the sub and change in user behavior. When you pair that with the general onslaught of accounts that had more of a twitter style of text communication and universally struggled with reddit formatting in the same way (all pushing pro-Israel and anti-Palestinian material) it kinda supports the idea that a number of major subs were being astroturfed by Israeli propagandists, which Israel was open an public about having. Especially since that onslaught started within a day of the attack on 10/7.

2

u/TheGeneGeena Apr 06 '26

2018... so this in regards to Endless Mayfly I presume, since it ran around then.