Hacker News Reader

Comment by rebelde | Hacker News Reader

I visited the worldnews subreddit at times. The pro-Russian tilt with plenty of links to RT.com was fairly obvious. I thought about writing the moderators, but with it so obvious, I personally assumed that there was somebody on the moderation team protecting the Russian submissions.

View on HN

There was definitely something going on in 2006. Reddit has always been rather left-leaning, but for a ~6 month period the top of /r/worldnews was nothing but "Immigrant commits <crime>" and similar. I'm sure some real people got drawn into it, but there was definitely some funny business.

That stuff is in /r/news now, although the controlling faction changes on occasion.

It can be organic if enough people who share an interest in world news have been influenced by their earlier marketing efforts.

In the early 2010s RT invested heavily in advertising to people who can be vaguely classified as "political contrarians", somewhat dissatisfied with how the American government uses its power, but also sufficiently aligned with mainstream politics.

Similar efforts have been undertaken by Qatar (Al Jazeera - AJ+). China (CGTN) is a new entrant, but I haven't watched it closely to say if they're taking the same approach.

I was going to ask if they had banned RT, since it took four pages of mostly Guardian and BBC links to find an RT submission.

For "world news" they have virtually no links to media outside the US/Europe.

I guess they did something to stop what you describe anyway.

I was going to say "if I call washingtonpost.com links pro-American tilt", would you subscribe to that view? But then you'd say "but the RT is state-sponsored!" to which I would say "there are many mechanisms to influence media other than owning them, see e.g. Manufacturing Consent" etc etc.

It's like we're running around in circles with this conversation, neither side seems to be getting to the other side.

Instead I'll take a more pragmatic approach. Could you please share one of these RT.com links which you say have a pro-Russian tilt? I want to see if I agree with you. Then I'll share a washingtonpost.com link which I think has a pro-American tilt; I want to see if you agree with me.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com