[nopelynopington]

Sadly true. I saw the same thing happen in real-time as Imgur transitioned from being image hosting for Reddit to an independent network.

It went from people posting silly memes and cute dogs to angry political stuff dominating the front page every day.

[DrScientist]

I think you under estimate how much of the angry political stuff is driven by paid for content by people with an agenda - and companies like Meta have just taken the money.

Sure in the end it sweeps up indviduals but money and professional narrative shapers are often behind these things.

There are a cadre of highly competance professionals in the advertising/PR area that were massively enabled by the tools that Meta et al provided ( for money ) - suddenly you could run campaigns that were highly effective, relatively cheap, and almost invisible.

This has been ruthlessly exploited by people and organisations with more money that morals.

Goverments have in part been asleep at the wheel, but also too keen to use such tools for their own ends.

[nopelynopington]

In Imgurs case it's all left leaning. Lots of scaremongering about what project 2025 and how close we are to dictatorship and lots of alarmist ragebait.

I saw a post just over a week ago from a user who predicted that Trump would declare martial law on April 20th because that was the day such and such report would advise him to do so.

It made the front page with hundreds of upvotes and comments agreeing. it's an extreme example but the site is full of this kind of stuff, most often bringing your attention to some obscure ruling or decision, some new political depth plumbed that will mean x,y, and z will now happen.