This is true! I know this because thats what I did. You can get away with almost anything as a reddit mod, and can systematically control whatever userbase you want.

In some case this is benign, like with advertisers and marketing, and in other cases it is much worse in which case there could be actual foreign enemy governments doing psyop campaigns on reddit.

Reddit isn't controlled by the company. Instead it is controlled by an army of anonymous nobodies who could have all sorts of bad motivations.