The ranking Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee, Senator Mark Warner considers Reddit as a potential tool of Russian social media influence, The Hill reports. Warner has also spearheaded efforts to scrutinize Facebook and Twitter as potential tools for foreign interference in the election.
Experts who have studied Russia’s attempts to influence the election say that Warner is right to be interested in Reddit, The Hill adds. They note that many fake news stories can be traced back to the platform, pointing to it as the catalyst behind the spread of Pizzagate, a baseless conspiracy theory that sought to link Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton to a fictitious pedophilia ring in a Washington pizzeria in the final days of the campaign.
“Reddit is one of the forms that some of the coordinated information campaigns happened on,” says Samantha Bradshaw, a researcher at Oxford University who has studied how governments use social media to influence public opinion. Bradshaw noted that she’s witnessed patterns on the site that suggest a deliberate effort to distribute false news.
She pointed to several examples of hoax political stories disseminated on Reddit ahead of the election, including Pizzagate and allegations of illegal electioneering. With its focus on viral content and internet culture, Reddit is seen as a crossover space between more obscure internet subcultures like the 4Chan and 8Chan message boards and more mainstream sites like Facebook and Twitter.
Like 4Chan and 8Chan, which have become hubs for white supremacists, anti-Semites and other extremists, Reddit has pro-Trump forums where offensive content and news stories with dubious credibility can be posted without oversight, The Hill adds.
Reddit’s position among several types of internet users allows it to be a place where memes and “fake news” stories from more extreme sites can reach Reddit’s 542 million monthly visitors – and, in some cases, spread to Facebook and Twitter.
Reddit could also be vulnerable to foreign interference because the site has much looser terms of service than Twitter and Facebook. While Facebook and Twitter have algorithms and human teams reviewing harmful and fake content, Reddit has traditionally taken a more hands-off role, relying on the volunteer moderators of its various communities to police those same communities, The Hill writes.
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