What are some astroturfed or biased online spaces (ie. subreddits) that newcomers would not know about?
Where the bias isn't obvious until you spend time on them.
The first examples I can think of are r/Canada and r/WorldNews
r/Canada was taken over by right-wing mods, including some fsr right extremists and at least one open white supremacist.
The sub isn't made far right though. The moderation is more subtle, with clear bias in moderation regardless of source.
Articles critical of right-wing parties, policies, and politicians (even fact-based pieces) will often be silently removed, often for being "repeats" since there are multiple articles from different sources about the same topic. So only one post will stay up. Yet "repeats" of articles critical of left-wing stuff are allowed, as are "repeats" of non-political topics.
Comments are not as heavily moderated, but left-wing biased comments are more targetted.
Outright racism is generally removed. But plenty of comments talking about "certain types of people" or "people from certain countries" are allowed... unless those comments are talking about white people or Canadians, in which case even those "subtle" comments are removed for "outright racism". The up/downvotes also tend to follow this trend.
The sub got to this point probably around the pandemic, when Canada's explicitly far-right extremist sub, r/MetaCanada got shutdown. The userbase migrated to r/Canada, and some of the mods from r/MetaCanada were welcomed into the r/Canada mod team (including the aforementioned open white supremacist). The right-wing extremist mods also started pushing out the more moderate, centre, and left-wing mods.
It's the kind of shitshow that an outsider would never notice. Makes me sad that they have the "official" name, just r/CountryName...
This was my first thought but I'd mention the left sub /r/onguardforthee that popped up in response.
Yeah, I liked it there. I would never deny that the sun was left-leaning, because it inevitably attracted a left-leaning crowd. But it never silenced right wing opinions from what I recall. Downvotes, sure, but not deleting posts or unbalanced moderation.
They were never even telling right-wing people things like "You already have at least 2 other subs to discuss your views. Let us discuss ours here", like places like r/Conservative say.
Canada always had that weird vibe. I get the immigration is a huge fucking issue but they did love adding dash of racism because facts alone ain't enough for "these people"
Not sure why this post is on Lemmy. Is it copied over?
I wanted to post here instead of on reddit. Reddit is large, and astroturfing on Reddit can affect everyone
LegalAdvice. It's literally run by cops who regularly advise people to incriminate themselves.
Whaaaaa? That's crazy. I use to read it on the reg years ago but fell off long before the June exodus. Has this always been the case? I feel like this maybe wasn't the case back in the heydey (Tree Law!) but IANAL and was there for the entertainment.
Apparently they demodded 2 of the cops, and 2 of them are still there.
BadLegalAdvice ironically has good legal advice.
Any popular posts that involve a minority/enemy of right wingers doing something bad or sticking out get brigaded. A blatant example is PublicFreakout where threads are usually fairly normal unless it's a black/arab/Indian person doing the antagonizing then pretty much all the top comments are dog or regular whistles. Similar "brigading" can happen even in a city subreddit similar to r/Canada even if they are regular users otherwise. If the post is good enough fodder the subreddit will suddenly resemble a klan meetup even if it's usually otherwise "normal".
ActualPublicFreakout is an alternative that doesn't need brigading because it's already similar to WorldNews.
brigading
A concentrated effort by one online group to manipulate another. (e.g. by mass commenting)
4chan's /v/ is a great example of regular heavy astroturfing
Everywhere has bias, you can't escape it. Whatever happened to don't believe what you see on the internet.
I see your concern for truth in any scenario, and I agree validity should be a constant consideration! However, bias and astroturfing are different. Bias is the lens that we use to look at reality. Astroturfing is forcing lenses onto many others without them knowing. It is a deliberate campaign.
All the ones for furries, not that it's even site-exclusive.
Worldnews