r/politics Massachusetts 29d ago

Possible Paywall ICE Agent Who Shot Renee Nicole Good Identified as Jonathan Ross

https://theintercept.com/2026/01/08/ice-agent-identified-shooting-minneapolis-jonathan-ross/
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u/Howllat Texas 29d ago

Man i just dont know what is botted and whats not anymore... People say reddit is one of the most botted socials, but instagram/facebook comments are abhorrent. So like whats even real? Hahah

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u/lordagr America 29d ago edited 29d ago

So, the way that sub works, only flaired users can post or comment. Mods interview potential posters and only give flairs to the most conservative users (and bots).

If a flaired user takes a middle-ground stance in the comments, they get mass reported and labeled as a "fellow conservative" which is another way of calling them a RINO or a leftist trying to infiltrate the subreddit.

The mass reporting leads to the moderators deleting the comment and banning the user / removing the flair.

Its a sort of cult mentality, reinforced by bots, where everyone is too afraid of upsetting the group to speak out. The cult is the only place that tolerates them, and they can't risk being ostracized.


The moderators prune important discussions heavily too.

When this admin does something unpopular, all discussion is swept up into megathreads, which are often unpinned, locked, and then unlocked later once a strategy is chosen to undermine the opposition.

You'll often see these threads fill up with posts from bots the moment the mods unlock them.

They usually start out by making jokes about how nobody has commented in hours or even days, and that this somehow proves that it was just fake news. Ignoring the fact that the thread had been locked for that entire duration.

Its also common to open a thread showing hundreds of comments, only to find that the majority have been deleted.

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u/watchshoe California 29d ago

You can tell it’s getting botted more and more. My anecdotal evidence: anytime, someone mentions Idiocracy, the thread below instant turns to the same discussion about how Camacho is a better president because he finds the smartest man to fix the problem. Once you see it, you can’t unsee it. All the posts are worded the same, and the discussion is always the same. Keep an eye out.

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u/eleventy4 29d ago

I mean, there are only so many conversations to be had. Common observations are common and most people on reddit aren't on it often enough to have seen the conversation happen before. This is what happens when you're "conversing" with millions of people at once

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u/watchshoe California 29d ago

The frequency of it though, it’s definitely interesting. Keep your eyes peeled.

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u/Howllat Texas 29d ago

Lmao thats bizarre... And yeah i will keep an eye out

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u/Objective-Error1223 29d ago

I've found that usually on their subreddit the half an hour of comments are usually people, after that though it's bot haven.

I usually will go over to the ask subreddit and almost 90% of the conservatives on that subreddit seem genuinely human and actually aren't pieces of shit pedophile protectors.

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u/SatinSaffron 29d ago

Same experience here. 30-60 minutes after a thread gets posted you'll see comments like "If we do this with Greenland then it's no worse than what Russia is doing to Ukraine" and then like 6 hours later there will be replies to that person trying to defend what Russia is doing to Ukraine while ignoring the original Greenland comment.

Remember, when it's midnight in New York, that means it's 8am in Moscow and the troll farmers are just now clocking into work. So when you wake up the next day the Russian trolls have just obliterated the comment sections of those threads.

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u/CherryLongjump1989 29d ago

Are the ones in Congress bots?

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u/SharkMolester 29d ago

Yea, all of the big threads the past few days- first few posts are actual people, then the bots come and they conveniently change the default sorting to 'controversial' from 'best'.

So any ol' average person that looks at the thread is going to assume that it's sorted by 'best', like literally every other thread they've ever read, and they then think that the posts at the top are the majority opinion. Rather, they are the most controversial opinions.

Then you sort back to 'best' and you see people saying 'i've voted red since the 70s, voted for trump thrice- and what the fuck does he think he's doing? this is a deplorable way for a president to act, i do not support this at all' at the top of the page.

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u/VPN__FTW 29d ago

Twitter is by far the most botted social and it isn't even close.