[ZeroGravitas]

I remember the gulf war, I remember long established members of the boards I inhabited at the time, usually but not always with a right-wing lean, going absolutely bananas at the time. And even the more reasonable ones basically lost the plot. If you really want a conspiracy theory, I'd point to the government and Fox news being desperate to pivot from 9/11 to one of the wars they'd been planning.

I also remember Reddit during the last election. Political sub-reddits that only had Bernie fans and internet libertarians during non-election years suddenly got swamped by "normal" people, and the regulars started conspiracy theories about who all these people were with their "weird" opinions.

The fact is, reddit's demographics skew young & educated, any outside observer would expect them to be more liberal than the average American, and they mostly are, even accounting for the male skew and the pockets of reactionaries that make their home there.

The whole Correct the Record thing is on a par with pizzagate. I'm always saddened that I can't tell the difference between those who've been naively sucked in and those who repeat these things out of a political motive. I used to assume they were mostly in-the-know, but my faith in humanity has ebbed and I can no longer attribute to malice what is adequately explained by them mostly being brainwashed by the most feeble of conspiracy theories.

[jpfed]

>The whole Correct the Record thing is on a par with pizzagate.

Do you mind clarifying in what respects they were similar to you? I haven't heard much in the way of specifics re CtR, but pizzagate was just... zero percent true. Was CtR similarly untruthful, or were they similar in some other dimension you find relevant?

[ZeroGravitas]

Just like there really is a Ping Pong pizza restaurant, there is a Super PAC called "Correct the Record"

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Correct_the_Record

As the name suggests, they thought that trolls spreading lies was a problem, and they tried to "correct the record".

In the darker corners of Reddit on the other hand, every opinion that disagrees with them is written by a shill funded by George Soros, who in their version is a Nazi collaborator, rather than a victim of the Nazis.

The fact is that the average American is fairly "liberal" by many measures. Lots of Democrat policies have broad support. Democrats have been winning the popular vote for a while. Elections with high turnouts favor Democrats etc. etc. Republicans win via the standard political strategies rather than by reflecting the will of the people.

And that's all Americans. Reddit is obviously going to have even more liberal voices due to the demographics. We don't need to invoke a conspiracy theory to figure out why someone would call out a false right-wing talking point on Reddit.

[codr4life]

Was it now :) Boy, are you in for nasty surprises once the truth hits the fan for real. It didn't bother you a tiny bit that the whole stinking pile of bullshit peddlers went into panic mode to cover everything up asap?