Reddit's Largest Pro-Trump Subreddit Appears To Have Been Targeted By Russian Propaganda For Years
A handful of articles from websites with connections to Russia's infamous troll factory have been shared thousands of times on /r/The_Donald.
It appears that right-wing news websites funded by Russia’s Internet Research Agency have been aggressively targeting Reddit’s largest pro-Trump subreddit, /r/The_Donald, for over a year.
In a viral thread posted to /r/FuckTheAltRight last week, a user named DivestTrump laid out a staggering list of suspicious political content coming from a handful of domains. As Facebook and Twitter have become more active this year in tackling fake news, bots, and political bad actors, it has left Reddit as one of the few places where people are freely sharing links online. /r/The_Donald currently has over 600,000 subscribers and still acts as the pro-Trump world’s central hub for memes, talking points, and conspiracy theories.
The bulk of the investigation that was posted to /r/FuckTheAltRight focused on two suspicious domains: brutalist.press and usareally.com. Both domains were registered in Russia, both sites contain linguistic errors common with other Russia-affiliated sites, and both heavily targeted /r/The_Donald. Based on job listings posted online, brutalist.press appears to have been created in St. Petersburg in 2016. And usareally.com is owned by a member of a civil society institution called the Civic Chamber of the Russian Federation.
https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/ryanhatesthis/reddits-largest-pro-trump-subreddit-appears-to-have-been
