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Homeland Security Spying on Reddit Users: Leak show feds tracking anti-ICE Reddit users like "Budget-Chicken-2425"
(www.kenklippenstein.com)
this post was submitted on 08 Feb 2026
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Reddit is State Department agitprop. This leak is probably a tiny fraction of their operations on reddit.
It's crazy how successful that platform is because nobody suspects it. Redditors all hate the other social media platforms. They cannot fathom that reddit is just as bad or worse.
But why is that. Is it the illusion of control. Because ostensibly its a user curated site. Because they think they have voting power. All of these things have proven to be completely false time and again. Yet the illusion of reddit persists.
While I agree that Reddit is awash in (multiple) state propaganda, and that posting violent rhetoric, or even sympathy for it, there is likely to put you on a list (or multiple), I don't think Reddit users really trust it's that safe. In the last year and a half, since Luigi, there has been huge amounts of bitterness over the censorship of content and strict banning policies. People have discussed, and followed through on, leaving in droves. Huge amounts of old content are no longer available because people scrubbed their post history on the way out.
If the current discourse doesn't reflect that, I would suggest it's because :
It's an addiction just like any other social media site, being cut off from the supplier is one of a few ways to end addiction, so I've appreciated their ban-happiness lately (for myself included).
Also, blocking it entirely in your browser / firewall can do wonders in keeping one from relapsing... helped me personaly a lot.
The user interaction metrics they've added have been interesting tho. Millions of south and SE Asians are flocking to reddit.
It's been wild to watch how the site has grown over the past 15 years for me. Back durning trump's first term I deleted my account and alts due to paranoia. I'm starting to think I should do the same for newer accounts or abandon the site entirely; hense my presence here.
I heard murmurs about Lemmy when the API shit was going down a few years ago but it was so small back then the switch didn't really make sense for me. Now that the paranoia is back I don't feel as comfortable/safe commenting on reddit anymore
Between reddit's control freak mods, their selective enforcement of rules, their lack of mod behavior restrictions, ads made to look like postings, etc you have very little freedom outside of porn surprisingly. You have to stick to the groupthink in subs or get banned which makes most comments predictable, agreeable and milktoast.
What other examples of bullshit can you give us?
It's kind of well-known and a long-running meme at this point that Redditors have a superiority complex about other platforms and think only theirs is the most "intelligent" and "rational" platform. It dates back to when it was mostly controlled by right-libertarian fedora-wearing raging atheist types.
Did you just log on to the Internet for the first time yesterday?
Those were the good ol days. Now it's controlled by maga. It's getting closer to twitter every day, soon it will just be another republican propaganda site
What the fuck are you people on about? Have you been on reddit? Go look at r/all right now, or any other time. You have to go to r/conservative to find magats, and even there you'll find skeptical sentiments.
I used reddit long before the /r/thedonald showed up. Before /r/atheism became a default sub, which was terrible for the community of that sub. It became meme infested and caused /r/trueatheism to be made for sharing stories about religion intolerance from politicians, educators and employers. At a certain point, I started wholesale blocking any major sub and power user to reclaim some usability, but the API change signaled to me it wasn't worth the effort anymore.
My reddit account is almost 18 years old so I know that you're talking about. I came to lemmy at the time of the API change as well, but I stayed on reddit too. I'm not giving them any revenue: I use old.reddit and RES, so I don't see and ads.
But blocking subs, as much as I also did that until I hit the limit of 100 blocked subs, is the wrong approach. Instead, you sub to the ones you like and avoid /r/all.
I was perma banned for saying "fuck all republicans". They don't want maga to be tied to the republican party for when trump is gone
Edit: this was when trump 'won' the second time and everyone was shouting "fuck maga".
And that experience tainted your view of reddit. Don't get me wrong, there's plenty of reasons not to like reddit as a company, but the community is not the company. It's up to you to make your own experience good or bad there, same as in lemmy.
i used to use reddit from 2014 to 2024 and its gotten far more rightwing. The sheer amount of accepted racism and openly right wing stances on reddit these days is shocking to me. That kind of stuff would get you insta banned or downvoted into oblivion. Reddit culture has completely 180'd and it has no remnants of its former self.
I don't know where you're seeing that. Unless you go looking for it in right-wing subs, the vast majority of reddit is very clearly to the left and any right wing comments are immediately downvoted to hell.
Have you ever heard a twitter user talk about reddit? They all hate each other.
People in this thread are perfect examples of that. They hate reddit so much they have to talk shit about it, regardless of reality.
A lot of lemmy users are ex reddit users and have reason they switched. I switched because it started looking more and more like twitter.
Yes, that's probably it. You and others had some bad experience there and fled reddit, and now your opinions are based on that bad experience instead of reality. I'm on both. I'm both lemmy and reddit you create your own experience. If you failed to do that, I'm not surprised you didn't like it.
The fuck does this mean? How is my experience not reality? What else are my opinions suppose to be based on, if not my experience?
Reddit was showing signs of introducing a more algo based experience, so I fucked off. They would hardly be the first website I left because of shit like that.
As long as you recognize it's a meme and not reality, I'll forgive that ridiculous generalization.