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[–]kallyr 6 insightful - 1 fun6 insightful - 0 fun7 insightful - 1 fun -  (2 children)

I'm from a small east-european country that is pretty socially conservative, and mostly posted on my country's subreddit. We had a referendum 2 years ago on whether to modify the constitution to make gay marriage impossible. The public opinion on every post was 50-50 and I've never seen such vitriol, heavy disagreement and upvote/downvote wars where a comment could swing wildly from negative to positive votes. Business as usual!

This year we had a conservative politician propose a law to ban all gender&idpol ideology from being taught in universities. The opinion was overwhelmingly negative, and all comments that politely agreed with the politician's proposal were downvoted into oblivion. I've seen astroturfing and vote manipulation before, but I know my people and there's NO WAY we did such a massive shift in 2 years. Hell, earlier this year a coworker said (in front of HR) that he would break a gay's legs if they tried to hit on him, and nobody blinked.

I hoped foreign-language subreddits would be safe from the blatant discourse manipulation that infected the entire damn site.

[–]cloudrabbit[S] 2 insightful - 1 fun2 insightful - 0 fun3 insightful - 1 fun -  (1 child)

You spoke your native language on that subreddit, not English? Then I wonder how that's possible. Wouldn't expect many American TRA to know anything other than English. Did their comments have a non-native feel to them?

[–]kallyr 1 insightful - 1 fun1 insightful - 0 fun2 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

I'm just as surprised as you are... yes we all speak our native language there, that's why I was VERY surprised. No, they all sounded native, some of them were actually decently articulate but all their arguments were imported from the American TRA's. Check out mainstreet.one and highergroundlabs.com, they are some outright dystopian startups that are offering their services in manipulatuing Internet discourse. I used to think this was a crockpot theory but no. It's a service, has employees who believe in its mission, who post their faces and their rates online. I hate 2020.