Reddit is a system of control

Europe’s biggest forum can’t help but push America

Fellow Europeans, I am here to spook you.

How does design, governance and influence shape the behaviour of 850 million monthly Redditors? As far as anyone and any AI could find, no one has yet thought this worth answering, which is mad.

The internet is not made with a successful Europe in mind. The boys at the Joint Research Centre agree - but as the EU crawls shivering to ‘tech sovereignty’, it still drags its denial of just how grim the situation is - celebrating on X to the modest response of 300 idiots.

X gets the most attention, but what about Reddit? It is precisely the place where young Europeans learn about their continent, the world and themselves. It hosts the largest forum on European issues, with 1.7 million visitors and 33,000 posts each week, along with forums for Germans (800k visitors a week), Italians (300k) and many others.

Remember, as soon as you have to describe anything, it always starts to sound mad.

Reddit is a system of control?

Yes, systems usually are. Start with the common sense view that a person is shaped by their environment. From that perspective, any environment, like a game, can be looked at as controlling its users through the rules and tools it provides, which, if you take them up, affect your behaviour, beliefs, actions and reactions. Like how Monopoly turns you into a psychopath.

This doesn’t mean Reddit was deliberately intended to manipulate people beyond giving them a space to play in with certain rules to keep things moving. But that doesn’t matter. As a stream of news, politics and mass opinion that you carry away into the wider world, you are influenced by its design, governance, community and the people who influence them. It affects what you see in the world, what you think and how you feel about it. In other words, when you use Reddit, it can’t help but use you.

Is Reddit dying?

By most counts, Reddit has been dying for 15 years. But clearly it is not very good at it.

Who uses Reddit?

Up to date figures here.

from here. Statista is paywalled and Reddit does not publish per-country stats. If you have Statista access, send me a screenshot.

What is Reddit?

Reddit is the successor to the internet forum - every internet forum. The user generally picks an anonymous alias and interacts with mostly-anonymous others - it would be very strange to have friends on Reddit. It is split into subreddits that define areas of interest, denoted with an r/ like r/news, r/brussels and r/soccer. Users submit posts, which could be text, a link, photo or other media, and comment on the posts of others.

It improves on the forum experience in three major ways. First, rather than ordering posts by latest comment, posts are voted on by users (‘upvote’/ ‘downvote’) to feed a ranking algorithm. Second, a user is able to subscribe to only subreddits that interest them, creating a personal homepage with its own ranking algorithm. Third, it positions itself as a mass-aggregator, encouraging users to repost everything off Reddit, onto Reddit, and quickly becomes the only place its users learn about what is going on. In its own words: the frontpage of the internet. All additions since, like avatars, badges or awards, are unimportant.

As a result of its design, Reddit is not an influencer-dominated space in the usual sense. Users do not often follow individuals. There is no direct money incentive for users from ads. Influence, as far as it goes, is hidden or diffuse.

Reddit has a strange reputation, both outside and in. It is generally considered cringe. If anything, it stands testament to the fact that, if you get enough people together, they struggle to produce anything of real value. New cultures, ideas or behaviours are rarely produced. It is, very publicly, a slop trough, distinguished from its contemporaries by the fact it is slightly more public.

It also makes up a fair volume of the primordial ooze fed to AI. Take that as you will, it is ‘beyond the scope of this blog’.

Now, to get down to business, let’s talk about power.

0. Foreword

In this highly rigorous analysis, the authors - all distinguished in their own right, well-known in the field and with coveted positions in the department - separate the governance structure of Reddit into three layers that, while affecting each other, have distinct forms of control: the mass, the mods and the machine. Drawing on both what is known and what can be implied (as secrecy, incomplete data and a collective desire not to look are to be expected henceforth), the authors analyse how control works, particularly on a European user. This combines both observed and potential control - the authors stress that the wider academy has utterly fucked it on this topic, and since there is no visible rush to plug the literature’s various yawning gaps, present analysis must make do.

1. The mass

Users are given a portion of control over each other by vote - one vote per post per account - up or down. In the usual fashion, they generally reward those they agree with and punish those with whom they do not.

Since the highest rated posts are also the most visible, and very low rated posts effectively invisible, a subreddit will trend towards a narrow consensus of thought and behaviour when left to its own devices (an ‘echo chamber,’ see Cinelli et al., 2021), with contrarians leaving to form a subreddit of their own, such as the more right wing r/belgium2. This may split further, such as r/belgium4, banned for promoting hate, and r/belgium100, a joke.

As much as a user might change their mind on issue X due to another users’ argument, little discussion is observed. Insofar as a user changes their mind at all, it is by ingesting what it is normal to believe, how to react and what to believe or react about. As a result, comments will tend to feature the same ideas or phrases over and over again. Colleagues in anthropology observe that users ritualistically take turns to post ‘FAFO’ in an approximation of kinship.

Look, I don’t need to resurrect Rene Girard to tell you that people copy how to act and what to think from those around them. Your children do this. You do this. No, you didn’t stop at 25 because your brain got big enough (was that it?), you just settled into a routine. You finally adjusted to your environment. If something disrupts it, you will change again. You already know this.

On a screen, visibility stands in for proximity. What is seen is normalised. What is seen most is normal. Why is dad only capable of talking about immigration all of a sudden? (And how? His brain can’t change anymore!) Because it is all he sees online. They may as well be in his house! You are changing all the time.

1.1. Three months to white supremacy

To underline this point, new users on r/The_Donald were observed to adopt a new, radical (author note: radically racist) vocabulary over 90 days. Drink down enough of something, and the user will throw it up (Ferrillo, 2024).

1.2. Normal is American

As the earliest users, Americans spread onto the open plain to found the first subreddits, which focused on American issues and persist as such to this day. r/politics is American politics, r/news is American news.

The boys and I call this territorialisation

Continued demographic dominance assures that posts about American news and interests will outrank others. As on r/popular, any globally-facing subreddit will post-from and speak-to America by default. The authors note this even affects subreddits designed for explicitly non-American news. r/worldnews sticks close to topics the authors would expect on a US-facing global affairs program, r/worldpolitics is porn.

And that, re-territorialisation

This has several observable effects on the European user’s environment. What they see is most likely posted by Americans, framed by American logic, ordered with preference for what is valuable for Americans, and within the bounds of acceptable American beliefs.

With a feed thus, the European user oscillates between navigating the American gaze and behaving as-American too.

1.3. Bots

The mass layer is susceptible to campaigns by large groups of accounts who work together to change the norm: echoing the same viewpoints, supporting each others’ posts, drowning out the rest. So-called ‘brigading’. The authors, as young men, remember such brigades from 4chan’s /pol/ as a semi-regular fact of life.

Human brigades are rather old fashioned. Modern methods use bots. These are sometimes distinguished as ‘influence operations’ rather than ‘brigades’, but are identical from the perspective of a target.

As demonstrated by our unjustly-persecuted colleagues in a landmark study, infiltrating a subreddit is relatively trivial, as well as highly effective in changing the culture of human users: “all our treatments surpass human performance substantially, achieving persuasive rates between three and six times higher than the human baseline.”

This is the most interesting study ever conducted on Reddit, with huge implications for social media as a whole. It proved that bot networks are trivial for a non-specialist to set up, can function unnoticed, and users will gradually align with them - in fact, they’re more influential than humans. Anyone could, and a lot of organisations almost certainly are, influencing the mass in this way.

Redditors were outraged, Reddit threatened to sue and the University of Zurich blocked publication over ethics concerns. Now it is accessible only by mirror. The mediocre conspire to bring down the mighty. Whilst exhuming Girard, I may well dig up Cioran too.

The literature is inconclusive on the amount of active bots. In specific subreddits, it is speculated that 40% of posts are produced by bots; in general, the authors assume less. There is no sense at all of how many votes are bot-made. However, everyone agrees that states, especially those hostile to theirs, are all over it.

2. The mods

Each subreddit is governed by moderators (mods, henceforth): a volunteer corps of unpaid users who write and enforce the rules, without whom Reddit would not function. In practice, each subreddit is its own oligarchy of the mod class, with balance provided by users’ ability to create a competing subreddit at any point. The tension produced by this arrangement is routinely dispelled by collective derision of whatever ‘sad, fat, unemployed creature’ would choose to become a mod in the first place (author note: the authors were once mods).

Nevertheless, mods exert significant control over their flocks. They can ban users, delete posts, write new rules and bend old ones as they please, with clear affect on user behaviour. For more on Reddit rules, see Fiesler et al., 2017 and Liebmann et al. 2025.

Can’t anyone write an article by themselves anymore?

Huang et al. (2024) find that mods systematically remove comments opposing their political leaning: steering a subreddit in the direction of their choice.

There are famous examples. r/conservative operates a ban-on-sight policy for any opinion the mods deem non-conservative (author note: a shifting window of acceptability in line with US politics alone). Nominally a broad lefter-than-left UK subreddit, r/greenandpleasant does the same, with a lean towards ‘tankyism’.

2.1. Powermods

A moderator of many subreddits is referred to as a powermod, where ‘many’ can exceed 200. In 2022, the largest flock governed by a moderator totalled 293 million users (highest estimate). Reddit has since restricted moderators to a maximum of five 100,000+ user subreddits to somewhat puncture the potential for mass influence. As a reference point, the largest ‘normal’ subreddit is r/funny at 43 million users, which would take up 1 of 5.

via this post

2.2. Mod campaigns

Most mods head a small list of related subreddits and keep to themselves.

Others put their power to work. The war in Gaza produced rich examples of clear or implied mod allegiance, with seemingly nonpolitical subreddits quickly aligned with a particular ‘side’. The most obvious of these is the r/palestine network - made famous by an investigation from a lunatic.

We are on treacherous ground here. Lack of academic interest leaves ground free for everyone else, such as a political extremist, more than happy to put in the investigative work for the cause and eager for hysterical conclusions. Responses are equally hysterical, bickering over those conclusions. But beneath it all, no one disputes that deliberate political influence happens and is coordinated over a network of seemingly disconnected subreddits. If it makes you more comfortable, imagine this happening with a movement you don’t like because it probably does, though perhaps less obviously.

Fig. 1: Mod overlap between r/Palestine and other subreddits, via this post

Fig 2.: r/documentaries top posts this year, with 3/5 on topic. Note the other 2 are on theme - US focussed.

Fig 3.: Screenshot of r/therewasanattempt - a casual ‘funny fail’ subreddit with 1 million followers, 3 of 10 top posts are on topic, topped by a pro-Palestine banner.

In answer to the question ‘why does everything feel political now?’, the authors present figures 1-3. It is not a matter of quibbling over conspiracies - but rather, that whatever compels them, mods are free to politicise subreddits as much as they want, regardless of what the subreddit is ostensibly for. Be it over Gaza, race supremacy or imperial conquest, the ‘funny fail’ might grow an edge overnight.

As you get home from work, put down your guard, and scroll something mindless to relax

2.3. Mod takeover

In a ‘mod takeover,’ a new mod will employ various tactics to wrestle control from existing mods, and once in control, may work to change the culture or enact a revenge fantasy of their choosing.

2.4. Automod

Beyond the scope of this study is an analysis of automod and other tools used by moderators across the site. The authors refer the curious to this paper as an appetiser (Wright, 2022).

3. The machine

As a company, Reddit hardly inspires the conspiracies attached to Google or Meta. Somewhere between lack of ambition and hands-off philosophy, the authors do not look upon it with dread.

Much is made of the original founders’ libertarianism, but this is unconvincing as a major organising principle. While the long-lived r/jailbait (‘tempting’ teenage girls) and r/spacedicks (gore, perversion and assorted nightmare-fuel) beg for explanation (author note: confession?), the authors observed no attempt to insulate the site from state power. It is not the Pirate Bay, easily re-hostable and ready to revive from an island territory. Instead, Reddit appears to be a normal American company whose revealed philosophy is passive.

On the machine/ administrator layer, this suggests control works in the usual ways. In brief:

The company is vulnerable to state coercion, especially American, and will comply with government requests for information and censorship, including by Europeans.

from this report

With growth and the increased attention that comes with it, Reddit has acquiesced to social and media pressure to clean the site of ‘tempting’ teenagers, sawn-off genitalia, about half the extremism and a slice of the hate.

This reminded me of the short-lived r/european: launched in response to an r/europe ban on hate speech. It was 17% Nazi (self reported).

The process accelerated as Reddit prepared to sell shares to the public in 2024 - banning riskier communities, tightening control over mods, segregating porn and restricting API access to clean and better monetise its brand.

As with other publicly-traded social media sites, this leaves its relationship with bots ambiguous: hostile insofar as advertisers want assurance that they are reaching human users, and permissive insofar as advertisers want to reach as many accounts as possible.

In conclusion, the authors note a familiar constellation of state, culture, media and market influence over the machine layer, particularly from Reddit’s home country. Influence appears relatively minor thus far - the usual normalisation procedure of birth into the mainstream that sands-down offensive organs - but remains untested. They might speculate further on hidden or assumed control, but see nothing to gain.

What has changed on this layer is not so much Reddit the machine, the environment, but the greater environment around it. Reddit might not inspire conspiracy theories - America does. A stern call (tweet?) from the White House could set the machine to work at any time.

Exeunt Authors.

So what?

Reddit’s strength as case study is being close enough to larger social networks to draw general lessons (bot influence, demographic affect, company vulnerability, moderation etc.), but distant and unusual enough to avoid triggering a defense mechanism. As in, ‘I agree that I am spending several hours a night reacting to probably-bots on X, but I will continue as if I don’t agree at all until I forget.’ When it comes to our social network, we are all the Redditor who hides from what we know is true. Better to talk about another one.

For the Euro-user, the precise level of American pickling depends on the Euro-specificity of their feed. The norm is likely a mix, but it would be difficult to avoid the larger mass that steers general culture and casts them as peripheral. Their knowledge of American culture and politics can easily exceed that of their own. Mamdani takes the place of their local mayor. They will pick up American slang and concerns, regardless of their politics. This is not where a European identity is constructed on its own terms.

For Euro-comms, imagine you wanted to launch a campaign on Reddit. First, good luck, it is a difficult environment. Second, whatever message you bring lacks even a fraction of the potential that a bot-network or mod campaign could achieve for far less effort; and not to mention, would at all times be vulnerable to interventions by anonymous moderators, other bot networks, administrators or those who influence them. Europe cannot expect anyone else to ‘play by the rules.’

If a European presence becomes threatening enough, the rules may also suddenly change. The board is stacked, and will be flipped.

If Europe decides merely not to play, it’s even worse. Hostile influence will circulate with only the wiles of an anonymous, volunteer moderator class in defense.

We are talking about a system that beyond exerting passive (and potentially active) control, is easily captured. To the standards of normal governance, it is, at varying levels, corrupt, oligarchic and a distant monarchy. We do not think enough about online governance but we are online all the time.

For decades, Europe has been indifferent to the colonisation of digital space because the idea seems ridiculous with endless space to spread into. Yet, its users build their lives in American spaces - aligning ever closely with the values and perspective of an explicitly hostile power, or powers once we consider the influence campaigns that run riot, even where we expect them least. Controlled.

Forget the invasion of Greenland, our always-online lives are already under occupation.

Afterword

The depth of scholarship here is woeful. Yes, other networks might be more interesting, meaning there’s plenty more generalisable knowledge that is not-yet read. But we are neither short of academics nor think tanks. I permit myself one ‘what is going on?’ before agreeing with the Commission: action must precede perfect knowledge (and it is always thus).

First: what kind of online governance is desirable?

Then: what is the most effective way of wresting control from autocrats?

But: how to fend off the inevitable reaction?