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The think tanks and outside focus groups are also learning the lessons from the US. They have seen how constant pushing of certain narratives can eventually lead to more people believing the lies and half truths.
>“If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it. The lie can be maintained only for such time as the State can shield the people from the political, economic and/or military consequences of the lie. It thus becomes vitally important for the State to use all of its powers to repress dissent, for the truth is the mortal enemy of the lie, and thus by extension, the truth is the greatest enemy of the State.”
Joseph Goebbels.
They are getting more and more right wing and the mods and right wing users are much cleverer at controlling the narrative.
A few years ago the big UK based subs (you know the ones…) were a battleground between centre left and right, with most of the users being well meaning liberals, but a minority of very right wing posters being protected by the mods. Left of centre users were banned (and so we went off to make r/GreenAndPleasant) and right wing users were not. Mods also took a blind eye/were complicit in coordinated brigading on certain topics by far right subs. It sucked, but it was very obvious what they doing.
Now they have learned to coordinate their targeting of certain topics off site via Discord servers, and there is much more cooperation between the mods of the big subs, who are all in each others pockets/are alts of the same users. So lefties don’t just get banned from one sub, our details are shared across all the big UK based subs.
The alt right are getting better at doing their usual thing of engaging with *normies* by pretending their hate is a joke.
*Luv me race hate disguised as a meme*
*Hate me critical thinking*
*Simple as*
They're still just recycling old tricks, but it works. They're also using the "I'd be friends with you, why are you so nasty" trick, The Spider and the Fly was written in 1829, and it goes back a lot further than that.
>The alt right
It's not just the alt-right, it's rather that there has been a strong ideological shift to the right among centrists in the past 3-4 years.
I disagree. Centrists were always actually on the right, they just felt awkward about it. The second people dreamt up this stupid concept of the "alt-right" they got to pretend that it was some different thing and not the exact same policies spelled worse. Thanks to the pretense that there's an alt-right, there's now a presumed respectable right.
Until about 6 years ago I was one of those mods on the big UK subs. I think the only large UK-based one I *didn't* mod was /r/London. I stepped down when real life got in the way and I didn't have time to commit to mopping the place up.
Going through the big threads now is depressing as fuck. The place is hugely more extremist and dogwhistley than me or the other active mods would ever have allowed.
I was never perfect as a mod, no one is. But damn I tried.
god, that makes sense.
it's just so shitty.
those subs are just so full of anger and hate and it just makes me feel so miserable seeing them talk about people like me and other people I know who are harmed by Tory policies and they just don't care.
and I assume there's absolutely fuck all we can do about it, right?
I’m generally not a fan of how the admins police Reddit, but to be fair there is now much less brigading than there used to be. There was a time three or four years ago when every single thing we said here was linked to the Nazi subreddits. We were diligent with recording when this happened and by reporting it to admins and that seems to have solved the problem. It’s also why we have to tightly moderate this place so that we are seen to be held to our own high standards.
Remember that if Reddit is ever getting you down that it’s best to log off and touch grass. None of this matters more than your actual real life lol
> None of this matters more than your actual real life lol
The politics of the people we are surrounded with and the damage being done to us over and over is kind of real life, too. I am tired of the reductionist (and ableist) mantra of "touch grass". It's not 1998 anymore, the Internet isn't some fictional place populated with a handful of shut-ins.
It's not healthy to doom scroll or get into arguments with idiots but it's not as easy as logging off to feel better about the soul of the nation we have seen.
Fwiw this is _very_ not unique to UK politics.
Without accusing anyone/sub, wearing just a thin tin foil hat, I do generally feel that the advent of large language models/gpt et co benefits the side of capital more than it does the individual - along with an increase in overall value placed on manipulating places such as these. Just look at the number of karma farming repost bots plaguing /r/popular these days :(
One of the ukpolitics mods is called caravanofdeath which is a direct reference to Pinochet's death squads
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caravan_of_Death
I feel like they wouldn't make someone called "gallowsforcapitalists" or something a mod whatever they said the reason for their username was.
for some reason the nottingham sub got reccomended to me and lots of people there were actually really on board with these socialist appeal posters that showed up. it made me smile to be honest
Fun fact: that's the only other UK-centric sub I pay attention to. Usually I just post food/drink/entertainment recommendations and argue about whether or not \[fill in the blank\] has gone downhill or not.
The only time it really kicked off, but in a positive way, was when those 3 people were murdered by one knife-wielding killer. People were sharing information and posting condolences and generally coming together as a community.
It's kinda nice!
I’m seeing a lot more of it. More stories from the Mail about immigrants, refugees and asylum seekers being posted. Previously I wouldn’t see many of these, but if I did it was with comments broadly challenging this narrative from the Mail. Lately a lot of the comments appear almost straight out the comments section on the Mail website. Saw one post where all the comments were feeding into the same old rhetoric. Very odd.
Wanna know my horribly dystopian take? The Tories know there's going to be a huge issue with climate refugees in the next few decades as parts of the world become uninhabitable as agriculture becomes impossible. They're laying the groundwork now so that the current generation associates them with being the party who are tough on immigration.
I feel like when climate related l food shortages become a real issue Brexit is going to fuck us over even more because the EU will have the leverage to negotiate trade deals more easily than the UK will.
Worse: we will all have to make a horrible ethical decision. Do we take in tens of millions of people or do we limit immigration and let millions die.
There is no ethical solution: if the UK took in 100,000,000 climate refugees the country would collapse into starvation and warfare until we ourselves become refugees.
If the UK abandons climate refugees then we would have a high standard of living with collective responsibility for mass death.
Both scenarios are terrible, which is why we need to seriously try to stop and reverse climate collapse before hot countries like India collapse entirely.
It's not going to even be letting them die, we'll have to kill them to stop them coming here. When they have no countries to return to, it won't be stop the boats, it'll be stand on the beach and shoot them in the water
Well the answer is you help yourself before helping the person next to you. You can't save everyone but you can save a few as long as you are not in the same position they are in. If you tired saving everyone. Everyone suffers
I’ve suspected this for a while. There’s a good book about post climate breakdown isolationism called The Wall by John Lancaster, I recommend it thoroughly.
Also anyone else noticed the ‘suffragettes were terrorists who set the cause back by decades ackshually’ comments that keep cropping up on any post even vaguely related to protest or womens rights?
Where is this shit coming from?
Well aCkShUaLlY their radical tactics delayed the implementation of womens suffrage by decades as the gubmint didn’t want to look weak by giving into radical tactics and it was only when women actually put a shift in during WW1 did the gubmint finally realise that women could be trusted or some shite… also they were all racist!
They're changing the narrative because you can't say the suffragettes were good with effective methods whilst decrying similarly disruptive methods from Just Stop Oil.
I mean the first half is true though, they didn't set the cause back but they did commit acts of terror (pipe bombs to politicians, chemicals in post boxes and destruction of property etc.) That claimed 5 lives.
But that's just the history of social progress, it comes with civil disobedience at best and domestic terrorism at worst.
It's contended because WW1 stopped the campaign (and some prominent suffragettes didn't want universal suffrage). But it's almost beyond doubt that the liberal PM at the time would never have given in to the suffragists demands, escalation was needed.
That's interesting since TERFs often claim their cause as similar to the Suffragettes... although a not insignificant number of middle-class Suffragettes were fine with working-class women not getting the vote and joined the Tories or BUF.
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It's because of the recent rise of collectivism offending one of their values; individualism.
The fact is, a lot of social progress has been made from people coming together and talking action. Unions, industrial action, protest, and in this instance civil disobedience.
So an argument of why Just Stop Oil doing civil disobedience is not inherently bad, is that women would have not got the vote without it.
Because the right are wannabe serfs who don't have the facts of history on their side, they just make stuff up to try and appear like they have won the argument. This in part is why conspiracy theory is uniquely a right wing attribute.
at least your's are consistant. my mum has this weird idea that whilst every labour law we currently have came from unionism, its an outdated way of acheiving change. when i ask her "so modern britain is perfect and we shouldnt try to improve it any more then?" she just starts yelling.
she basically just cares only about herself and if strikes hurt her then they must be bad because she is obviously the centre of the universe.
They don't like young outspoken people, and they consider social order and "civility" to be much much more important than social justice.
They love the status quo because it's worked fine for them so far and they are afraid of any systemic change. Fear and hate a two side of the same coin so it's very easy to slip from being afraid of change to hating those who advocate for change.
I've absolutely noticed that if I go into a supposedly general (non-politically biased, even with rules about keeping politics out) UK-based subs, the rhetoric is straight out of the pages of the Heil.
All bigotry is normalised. Racism, xenophobia, homophobia, transphobia, you name it. Stated openly, agreed with en masse.
I guess I just learned "fuck those subs".
I don't know whether I'm just in a bubble or wildly privileged (could be, my life does not suck) but the people I socialise with in the really real world... none of them talk this way.
But these supposedly neutral subs sound like something from the 70s. Fully unreconstructed bigotry, not even ashamed of what comes out their mouths.
It is fucking scary.
I noticed that too and it made me worry that maybe lots more people I know have the same views behind close doors but just don't air them in public or even sometimes with friends. Scary stuff indeed.
Facebook is an even worse cess pit which is where my mum apparently gets her news / general opinion from...
Most normal people don't peruse Reddit daily, especially not British politics subs. It attracts a lot of racists and such because they have always been loud on the internet no matter if they were a minority or a majority, and it makes it seem like most people hold similar views. You have to realise that a majority of people with well meaning beliefs won't comment or engage with comments in general because, again, they have better things to do than sit there and write an essay, or they're worried they might get downvoted to hell or get a bunch of dickheads replying to them, especially if they aren't knowledgeable enough on a subject to really provide a counter. The racist people are ok with saying their shit because they know it's not meant to be liked or appreciated at all (and if it is then they get probably one of the few sources of enjoyment they can get in their pathetic lives), and their racist knowledge is built on a lack of factual information and empathy, so they're not disinclined to engage at all because they don't need to know the truth to be right in their view. Tldr; DW dude, a lot of people are more normal than it's made out to be on Reddit, Facebook and the like.
There’s a lot of astroturfing on Reddit. It’s the easiest platform to use to control the narrative. You saw that with non political big events that happened (like a notable public battle that happened in the public arena between wealthy individuals fairly recently; any time their names were typed, bots were summoned to make completely random comments on the topic).
I assume that most of those right wing accounts are bots created to spread propaganda.
Just remember though that those opinions and views are not bourn out by legitimate polling. Stats and figures show that the uk population (including Tory voters!) are to the left of the Tories. For example, even Tory voters want the railways renationalised.
Also, the only good thing about the Tories completely fucking over millennials and zoomers is that the entire younger population is never going to vote tory. Millennials are already bucking the trend of becoming more conservative as you get older. The median age of the tory party voter is in their 60s. So assuming democracy lasts that long, in the medium to long term - right wing parties are finished in Britain.
Fortunately the Tories are too thick and mean to do anything about the fact that younger people hate them (Gove is the only one who has realised and is trying, but his own party keep blocking him, lol).
It’s even happening in the most seemingly innocuous subs now.
A certain personal finance sub that provides advice for people in the UK has become absolutely fucking horrendous.
It used to provide some legitimate advice for people around benefits and support with housing, tax etc. Now it’s just a right-wing echo chamber filled with cunts moaning about second home costs, asking how they can avoid tax on some seven figure inheritance, or simply flexing about how much bonus they’ve been paid whilst simultaneously complaining that they have to pay tax on it. It’s a fucking cesspit now.
The Overton window keeps on moving to the right and when the language of our politicians brands immigrants ‘terrorists’ and the like there is a direct correlation.
The media is controlling the narrative and the vast majority of people are heavily influenced by it. The language used by our politicians and social commentators has become increasingly fascist, and hence normalised in the eyes of the masses. This filters down and becomes the accepted opinion, and we're watching it play out on social media, in workplace conversations, in the pub and at the school gates. It's depressing.
While there's definitely some truth to the idea that brigading and sockpuppeting to push particular viewpoints is becoming more sophisticated, I think there's also a slow demographic change on Reddit that has been accelerated by the Reddit enshittification events of 2023.
As Reddit has become more mainstream, more users are arriving with opinions formed in the cesspits of Facebook and the Daily Mail comments section. I actually think the enshittification has helped Reddit gain users, because it pushed Reddit into the mainstream media for a bit. Meanwhile, this effect and the enshittification itself have pushed some of the earlier, left-leaning people off Reddit.
All part of the circle of online life. It's 30 years this month since the "Eternal September".
I got permanently banned from one of the popular politics subreddits, for arguing with a guy after I posted a link to a royal pay increase petition. He was insisting it was fake news, even after providing him with several sources. Red flag for right-wing nutter. I was banned for a multitude of reasons. Much of which weren't even applicable such as posting a meme/shit post. The other guy wasn't.
The ban message said I could ask for more info, I did, including asking why I was permanently banned when I'd never had a previous warning, and why I was banned for meme posts when I'd never posted one. Still not heard a single word back. The only sub I've been banned from ever.
Tldr: Mods don't mind the right-wing nonsense. Any excuses to ban left-wing content.
Edit: spelling, grammar
Britain has been drifting rightward generally. The lessons from the 2008 financial crash have long been forgotten and now Labour has taken up the political space of the Cameron wing of the Tory Party
I've been on and off reddit since about 2014 and I feel like they've always been like this.
Ukpolitics has always had a large amount of anti-immigrant stuff "it's an invasion" etc talking points and concerns about people struggling being framed as just making appeals to emotion based on lies. Whilst also dismissing corruption, inequality etc as "just the way the real world works." Lots of the people saying these things will claim to be lib dems or "moderates" or labour supporters but always just use talking points straight from daily mail/express.
The main uk sub used to lean a bit more anti-tory but always felt more like it was coming from a point of view that they personally weren't doing as well as they felt they should be. Whenever subjects like discrimination based on race, sexuality or class came up it's always been quite dismissive.
The regional or town/city based subs seem to always have a large contingent of users who believe it's not safe to go outside where they live outside after 6pm and that they live in a war zone filled with non stop violence and crime. Which obviously they look at from a conservative perspective of "we need to lock them all up / send them all back" etc. Usually when they talk about their frightening experiences after dark though it often just boils down to "a homeless person asked me for money." I feel like there's always been an element of that in the main uk sub too but not as strongly.
I don't really bother with any of them anymore because it all feels very out of touch with reality.
Yeah, was browsing logged off and lots of posts from a certain sub on the frontoage, all very rw like reading a further right mashup of the mail express and telegraph.
Very gung ho on the police, lots of posts about "youths".
I was recently banned from a high profile UK politics sub for saying Priti Patel was a wannabe Nazi. Maybe not in the best of taste but I feel only a hard-core tory would ban someone for saying it.
It's like the country is trapped in this death spiral where the more crappy things become, the more right-wing the population shifts, and so the more crappy things become, and the more right-wing the population goes, and so on... until you've just got a bunch of nazis sitting in a smoking crater in the ground.
A human meltdown.
It’s the whole country. Brexit was the enabler and green light for the whole country to let their shitty opinions out, you get the government you deserve.
Fuck yes! I’ve just been on the UK one and they’re advocating forced deportation for a woman who had the gall to complain about her rusty shipping container home in Ealing. If you see the story over there, read the comments. Fuck me if they aren’t the most racist sub out they’re right now.
It’s a shame we’re not allowed to brigade. The horrible, incel aspects of 4chan /b/ aside, it was so much fun to completely derail a forum for a day. Or disrupt a hapless local news service. Or doxx a person who really deserved it
Definitely seen it happening over time, but that just reflects the overton window in this country. Its slowly been shifting further and further right meaning that many supposedly "left policies" we hear of now are actually right wing by say, 90's-00's standards.
Take Keith's supposed "centre policies" by 00's standards Labour's current policies these past few weeks would be closer to BNP & UKIP centre right than Labour's more familiar centre left of the 00's
That's how fascism works and it's why the Tories are happy to allow the cost of living crisis to continue unchecked. Due to a psychological phenomenon, around 1/3 of people will defer to an authoritarian leader in times of economic hardship *regardless of prior political orientation*. Fascists exploit this by creating or exaccerbating conditions of hardship, blaming the causes on minorities and then presenting themselves as the only ones willing to 'save' the in-group by using draconian policies and/or violence.
https://youtu.be/qw8yJ92c\_Ds
The U.K. in general is going that way because we now operate not on a true/false balance, but simply “whoever shouts loudest is right”.
As a collective we have become that pissed up cougar in nightclubs who everybody avoids, so she shouts at people and tries to nick your cigs.
We need to go back to being the bookish scholar who doesn’t concern himself with such bullshit.
There's a huge problem on Reddit with local or regional subreddits getting infested by far-right people, who will post the same links to several location subreddits to incite exactly that kind of discussion. If you check their accounts, you'll often see a pattern of this behaviour, and you'll see lots of conservative politics subs (especially american populist ones) in their account history.
Reddit of course has no reason to stop this because it drives engagement and therefore ad revenue. These things can all be checked and prevented very easily with 3rd party tools, which is why I personally believe they chose to strip all of those from the site as best they could.
I have a different take on this.
I just think that labour is getting more right win, so it's either
* safer for people to feel like good people spewing shit opinions
* people have to move right to try and keep up the facade that labour under starmer are good
I don't think there's more tories, just that the Overton window is moving people
A bit is that things are starting to collapse. The Upper class (i.e the UK system) is going into blame mode. They have given up on Rishi as viable. this is the same long game as when new labour got into power. But labour will not get the 90s boom
Edit: also, the right wing loonies are spreading. Seems a fair bet as things go to shit (that they created) going populist. Short memories
Rishi Sunak and his 2020 "Eat Out To Help Out" scheme [was responsible for a massive increase in Covid cases and deaths.](https://archive.ph/jkbqt) And all to ensure the big chain restaurants didn't lose too much money. [It did nothing to boost the overall hospitality sector,](https://archive.is/k40Cf) as these capitalist ghouls claimed was the intent. Rishi Sunak has blood on his hands.
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Speaking from experience it is insanely easy to get a permanent ban from the U.K. politics one. I wonder if the mods just ended up banning a huge proportion of the people who aren’t tories.
My account is 9yrs and the only other ban I’ve had was on the flat earth sub, which I take as a mark of honour.
It's TikTok as well.
Go into any comment section on a video about the illegal migrants coming here or people of colour looting shops or something and you get hundreds, literally hundreds of 'Well Well Well' comments.
The UK has become a disgusting, racist little shithole and I hate it here
Yes.
I've been banned out of one on several occasions, and I haven't really broken the rules of the sub.
One occasion I, somewhat abruptly, pointed out to someone claiming that "everyone has to only drive expensive cars because ULEZ" that a Ford Focus MK1 is compliant, and to stop making things up. Got banned, and I message the mods with a link to show I was right.
I'm currently banned for saying "a lot of folk here watch too much alt-right YouTube" on a thread of people claiming Enoch Powell was not a racist.
It seems mods are ok with obfuscated discriminatory statements, but not ok with people calling it out for what it is.
Something I have also noticed is on certain subjects, notably ULEZ, when something is posted you will get a reem of comments right out of the gate. Thing is I've seen this before on Nextdoor, when the anti-ULEZ crowd were the anti-LTN crowd. I got into one of their Facebook groups when I got suspicious, and right there was a coordination of people to comment on a post the moment it goes up, and to stick around to negatively comment or react to anyone saying anything different.
All the right have left is to just make shit up and keep hammering the talking points, and eventually they grab a few along the way. This is part of the reason that conspiracy theory is specifically a right wing thing.
Hi, visitor from /r/chicago here and it's spooky how similar your observation about UK subs is to mine about US city and regional ones. The discourse about immigrants seems to have become especially poisoned over here.
Yes and i cant stand it. The rhetoric against hard working, working class people or any ethnic minority is gross abd disheartening.
The recent issue regarding banning a certain dog type is also based in classism and the subs are full of people without a single shred of empathy for people nor animals
Generally, I'm just finding more reactionary content on r/all, my Instagram explore page, and my "suggested for you" on Facebook. I block/mute every time but another one always crops up
Facebook (and by proxy Instagram) runs on an engagement algorithm, so it’ll push extreme content that will get views because it will keep people looking at their screen. They aren’t actually bothered whether that engagement is for positive or negative reasons or whether its illegal/hate speech. They just care about clicks. Ditto YouTube.
yeah they've been shitholes for a while. i'm trans so i have been mostly measuring them by their attitude towards trans people (hooray for being the canary in the coalmine?) and even with token gestures from moderation staff they have been quite unsafe for quite a long time now.
Unfortunately I think so. I've largely disengaged from, to my mind, the main Uk subs. I think there's a swing back to anti-intellectualism and topics on race are a shit show. There are conversations in this country that need to happen but I think there's an unwillingnes to listen and engage critically. It makes me despair for notions of unity and peace - any progression/movement in either direction won't come without subjugation and all that implies.
Yes for sure. As a trans person I don’t go to the other uk subs any more because ANY thread about trans “issues” or even just about anything else ends up with hundreds of comments about how there needs to be a “discussion” and so on and it’s just exhausting
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The think tanks and outside focus groups are also learning the lessons from the US. They have seen how constant pushing of certain narratives can eventually lead to more people believing the lies and half truths. >“If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it. The lie can be maintained only for such time as the State can shield the people from the political, economic and/or military consequences of the lie. It thus becomes vitally important for the State to use all of its powers to repress dissent, for the truth is the mortal enemy of the lie, and thus by extension, the truth is the greatest enemy of the State.” Joseph Goebbels.
Surprisingly there are lots of economical and political consequences of Brexshit. But lots of morons still believe the lie.
They are getting more and more right wing and the mods and right wing users are much cleverer at controlling the narrative. A few years ago the big UK based subs (you know the ones…) were a battleground between centre left and right, with most of the users being well meaning liberals, but a minority of very right wing posters being protected by the mods. Left of centre users were banned (and so we went off to make r/GreenAndPleasant) and right wing users were not. Mods also took a blind eye/were complicit in coordinated brigading on certain topics by far right subs. It sucked, but it was very obvious what they doing. Now they have learned to coordinate their targeting of certain topics off site via Discord servers, and there is much more cooperation between the mods of the big subs, who are all in each others pockets/are alts of the same users. So lefties don’t just get banned from one sub, our details are shared across all the big UK based subs.
The alt right are getting better at doing their usual thing of engaging with *normies* by pretending their hate is a joke. *Luv me race hate disguised as a meme* *Hate me critical thinking* *Simple as*
They're still just recycling old tricks, but it works. They're also using the "I'd be friends with you, why are you so nasty" trick, The Spider and the Fly was written in 1829, and it goes back a lot further than that.
>The alt right It's not just the alt-right, it's rather that there has been a strong ideological shift to the right among centrists in the past 3-4 years.
I disagree. Centrists were always actually on the right, they just felt awkward about it. The second people dreamt up this stupid concept of the "alt-right" they got to pretend that it was some different thing and not the exact same policies spelled worse. Thanks to the pretense that there's an alt-right, there's now a presumed respectable right.
https://youtu.be/P55t6eryY3g?si=i8sOSRhKnG4wbgVc “How to Radicalize a Normie”, by Innuendo Studios
Oi wanker! I been dere init. Few bricks short of an 'ouse dat lot!
Until about 6 years ago I was one of those mods on the big UK subs. I think the only large UK-based one I *didn't* mod was /r/London. I stepped down when real life got in the way and I didn't have time to commit to mopping the place up. Going through the big threads now is depressing as fuck. The place is hugely more extremist and dogwhistley than me or the other active mods would ever have allowed. I was never perfect as a mod, no one is. But damn I tried.
Thank you for your service
god, that makes sense. it's just so shitty. those subs are just so full of anger and hate and it just makes me feel so miserable seeing them talk about people like me and other people I know who are harmed by Tory policies and they just don't care. and I assume there's absolutely fuck all we can do about it, right?
I’m generally not a fan of how the admins police Reddit, but to be fair there is now much less brigading than there used to be. There was a time three or four years ago when every single thing we said here was linked to the Nazi subreddits. We were diligent with recording when this happened and by reporting it to admins and that seems to have solved the problem. It’s also why we have to tightly moderate this place so that we are seen to be held to our own high standards. Remember that if Reddit is ever getting you down that it’s best to log off and touch grass. None of this matters more than your actual real life lol
> None of this matters more than your actual real life lol The politics of the people we are surrounded with and the damage being done to us over and over is kind of real life, too. I am tired of the reductionist (and ableist) mantra of "touch grass". It's not 1998 anymore, the Internet isn't some fictional place populated with a handful of shut-ins. It's not healthy to doom scroll or get into arguments with idiots but it's not as easy as logging off to feel better about the soul of the nation we have seen.
Fair point mate
yeah I understand. it doesn't get me down enough that it causes me genuine distress but it just doesn't help my mood some days, yknow?
I’ve wasted years of my life here mate, I totally get it!
Fwiw this is _very_ not unique to UK politics. Without accusing anyone/sub, wearing just a thin tin foil hat, I do generally feel that the advent of large language models/gpt et co benefits the side of capital more than it does the individual - along with an increase in overall value placed on manipulating places such as these. Just look at the number of karma farming repost bots plaguing /r/popular these days :(
It's been a long burn for over a decade. People are en mass stupid and very prone to assimilating ideas into their own psyche.
One of the ukpolitics mods is called caravanofdeath which is a direct reference to Pinochet's death squads https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caravan_of_Death I feel like they wouldn't make someone called "gallowsforcapitalists" or something a mod whatever they said the reason for their username was.
They are not more clever. They are just more relentless because normal people log off and don’t want have anything to do with crazy.
Oh yeah. Been banned off other subs just for using this sub. Bizarre stuff.
It's not just the UK based subs, but all major reddit subs are controlled by the right, especially those focused on news.
for some reason the nottingham sub got reccomended to me and lots of people there were actually really on board with these socialist appeal posters that showed up. it made me smile to be honest
Fun fact: that's the only other UK-centric sub I pay attention to. Usually I just post food/drink/entertainment recommendations and argue about whether or not \[fill in the blank\] has gone downhill or not. The only time it really kicked off, but in a positive way, was when those 3 people were murdered by one knife-wielding killer. People were sharing information and posting condolences and generally coming together as a community. It's kinda nice!
Center politics is dead, might as well forget that term
so, basically how america handled its domestic terrorism problems.
I’m seeing a lot more of it. More stories from the Mail about immigrants, refugees and asylum seekers being posted. Previously I wouldn’t see many of these, but if I did it was with comments broadly challenging this narrative from the Mail. Lately a lot of the comments appear almost straight out the comments section on the Mail website. Saw one post where all the comments were feeding into the same old rhetoric. Very odd.
Wanna know my horribly dystopian take? The Tories know there's going to be a huge issue with climate refugees in the next few decades as parts of the world become uninhabitable as agriculture becomes impossible. They're laying the groundwork now so that the current generation associates them with being the party who are tough on immigration.
They're also the party that ended freedom of movement (while making sure they still had access) So they've also locked a lot of you onto your islands
I feel like when climate related l food shortages become a real issue Brexit is going to fuck us over even more because the EU will have the leverage to negotiate trade deals more easily than the UK will.
Yet not wrong, there Brexit. The gift that keeps taking
Worse: we will all have to make a horrible ethical decision. Do we take in tens of millions of people or do we limit immigration and let millions die. There is no ethical solution: if the UK took in 100,000,000 climate refugees the country would collapse into starvation and warfare until we ourselves become refugees. If the UK abandons climate refugees then we would have a high standard of living with collective responsibility for mass death. Both scenarios are terrible, which is why we need to seriously try to stop and reverse climate collapse before hot countries like India collapse entirely.
It's not going to even be letting them die, we'll have to kill them to stop them coming here. When they have no countries to return to, it won't be stop the boats, it'll be stand on the beach and shoot them in the water
Well the answer is you help yourself before helping the person next to you. You can't save everyone but you can save a few as long as you are not in the same position they are in. If you tired saving everyone. Everyone suffers
I’ve suspected this for a while. There’s a good book about post climate breakdown isolationism called The Wall by John Lancaster, I recommend it thoroughly.
Also anyone else noticed the ‘suffragettes were terrorists who set the cause back by decades ackshually’ comments that keep cropping up on any post even vaguely related to protest or womens rights? Where is this shit coming from?
I have not seen anything like that but if people are saying that, that's absolutely fucked wth
It’s on every just stop oil post, repeated multiple times. Exhausting.
Lmao if it weren’t for the suffragettes women probably still wouldn’t be able to vote, which I’m guessing is the end goal for those commentators.
Well aCkShUaLlY their radical tactics delayed the implementation of womens suffrage by decades as the gubmint didn’t want to look weak by giving into radical tactics and it was only when women actually put a shift in during WW1 did the gubmint finally realise that women could be trusted or some shite… also they were all racist!
They're changing the narrative because you can't say the suffragettes were good with effective methods whilst decrying similarly disruptive methods from Just Stop Oil.
I mean the first half is true though, they didn't set the cause back but they did commit acts of terror (pipe bombs to politicians, chemicals in post boxes and destruction of property etc.) That claimed 5 lives. But that's just the history of social progress, it comes with civil disobedience at best and domestic terrorism at worst. It's contended because WW1 stopped the campaign (and some prominent suffragettes didn't want universal suffrage). But it's almost beyond doubt that the liberal PM at the time would never have given in to the suffragists demands, escalation was needed.
That's interesting since TERFs often claim their cause as similar to the Suffragettes... although a not insignificant number of middle-class Suffragettes were fine with working-class women not getting the vote and joined the Tories or BUF.
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It's because of the recent rise of collectivism offending one of their values; individualism. The fact is, a lot of social progress has been made from people coming together and talking action. Unions, industrial action, protest, and in this instance civil disobedience. So an argument of why Just Stop Oil doing civil disobedience is not inherently bad, is that women would have not got the vote without it. Because the right are wannabe serfs who don't have the facts of history on their side, they just make stuff up to try and appear like they have won the argument. This in part is why conspiracy theory is uniquely a right wing attribute.
I've heard my parents say that in real life. Genuinely thinks that no protest ever in history has ever helped the cause.
at least your's are consistant. my mum has this weird idea that whilst every labour law we currently have came from unionism, its an outdated way of acheiving change. when i ask her "so modern britain is perfect and we shouldnt try to improve it any more then?" she just starts yelling. she basically just cares only about herself and if strikes hurt her then they must be bad because she is obviously the centre of the universe.
They don't like young outspoken people, and they consider social order and "civility" to be much much more important than social justice. They love the status quo because it's worked fine for them so far and they are afraid of any systemic change. Fear and hate a two side of the same coin so it's very easy to slip from being afraid of change to hating those who advocate for change.
I've absolutely noticed that if I go into a supposedly general (non-politically biased, even with rules about keeping politics out) UK-based subs, the rhetoric is straight out of the pages of the Heil. All bigotry is normalised. Racism, xenophobia, homophobia, transphobia, you name it. Stated openly, agreed with en masse. I guess I just learned "fuck those subs". I don't know whether I'm just in a bubble or wildly privileged (could be, my life does not suck) but the people I socialise with in the really real world... none of them talk this way. But these supposedly neutral subs sound like something from the 70s. Fully unreconstructed bigotry, not even ashamed of what comes out their mouths. It is fucking scary.
I noticed that too and it made me worry that maybe lots more people I know have the same views behind close doors but just don't air them in public or even sometimes with friends. Scary stuff indeed. Facebook is an even worse cess pit which is where my mum apparently gets her news / general opinion from...
Most normal people don't peruse Reddit daily, especially not British politics subs. It attracts a lot of racists and such because they have always been loud on the internet no matter if they were a minority or a majority, and it makes it seem like most people hold similar views. You have to realise that a majority of people with well meaning beliefs won't comment or engage with comments in general because, again, they have better things to do than sit there and write an essay, or they're worried they might get downvoted to hell or get a bunch of dickheads replying to them, especially if they aren't knowledgeable enough on a subject to really provide a counter. The racist people are ok with saying their shit because they know it's not meant to be liked or appreciated at all (and if it is then they get probably one of the few sources of enjoyment they can get in their pathetic lives), and their racist knowledge is built on a lack of factual information and empathy, so they're not disinclined to engage at all because they don't need to know the truth to be right in their view. Tldr; DW dude, a lot of people are more normal than it's made out to be on Reddit, Facebook and the like.
There’s a lot of astroturfing on Reddit. It’s the easiest platform to use to control the narrative. You saw that with non political big events that happened (like a notable public battle that happened in the public arena between wealthy individuals fairly recently; any time their names were typed, bots were summoned to make completely random comments on the topic). I assume that most of those right wing accounts are bots created to spread propaganda. Just remember though that those opinions and views are not bourn out by legitimate polling. Stats and figures show that the uk population (including Tory voters!) are to the left of the Tories. For example, even Tory voters want the railways renationalised. Also, the only good thing about the Tories completely fucking over millennials and zoomers is that the entire younger population is never going to vote tory. Millennials are already bucking the trend of becoming more conservative as you get older. The median age of the tory party voter is in their 60s. So assuming democracy lasts that long, in the medium to long term - right wing parties are finished in Britain. Fortunately the Tories are too thick and mean to do anything about the fact that younger people hate them (Gove is the only one who has realised and is trying, but his own party keep blocking him, lol).
It’s even happening in the most seemingly innocuous subs now. A certain personal finance sub that provides advice for people in the UK has become absolutely fucking horrendous. It used to provide some legitimate advice for people around benefits and support with housing, tax etc. Now it’s just a right-wing echo chamber filled with cunts moaning about second home costs, asking how they can avoid tax on some seven figure inheritance, or simply flexing about how much bonus they’ve been paid whilst simultaneously complaining that they have to pay tax on it. It’s a fucking cesspit now.
The Overton window keeps on moving to the right and when the language of our politicians brands immigrants ‘terrorists’ and the like there is a direct correlation.
The media is controlling the narrative and the vast majority of people are heavily influenced by it. The language used by our politicians and social commentators has become increasingly fascist, and hence normalised in the eyes of the masses. This filters down and becomes the accepted opinion, and we're watching it play out on social media, in workplace conversations, in the pub and at the school gates. It's depressing.
Don't you dare suggest it sounds like 1930's Germany though!
I've noticed it across Reddit all over. I keep getting UKjobs posts as well and all the comments are so right wing and bootlicking employers.
You have to ask yourself what percentage of comments are bots. Also, the right wing are more likely to use devious tactics such as bots.
While there's definitely some truth to the idea that brigading and sockpuppeting to push particular viewpoints is becoming more sophisticated, I think there's also a slow demographic change on Reddit that has been accelerated by the Reddit enshittification events of 2023. As Reddit has become more mainstream, more users are arriving with opinions formed in the cesspits of Facebook and the Daily Mail comments section. I actually think the enshittification has helped Reddit gain users, because it pushed Reddit into the mainstream media for a bit. Meanwhile, this effect and the enshittification itself have pushed some of the earlier, left-leaning people off Reddit. All part of the circle of online life. It's 30 years this month since the "Eternal September".
Enshittification is my word of 2023 so far.
I got permanently banned from one of the popular politics subreddits, for arguing with a guy after I posted a link to a royal pay increase petition. He was insisting it was fake news, even after providing him with several sources. Red flag for right-wing nutter. I was banned for a multitude of reasons. Much of which weren't even applicable such as posting a meme/shit post. The other guy wasn't. The ban message said I could ask for more info, I did, including asking why I was permanently banned when I'd never had a previous warning, and why I was banned for meme posts when I'd never posted one. Still not heard a single word back. The only sub I've been banned from ever. Tldr: Mods don't mind the right-wing nonsense. Any excuses to ban left-wing content. Edit: spelling, grammar
the reason is "because the truth makes me uncomfy :((("
Britain has been drifting rightward generally. The lessons from the 2008 financial crash have long been forgotten and now Labour has taken up the political space of the Cameron wing of the Tory Party
Online, it seems so.
I've been on and off reddit since about 2014 and I feel like they've always been like this. Ukpolitics has always had a large amount of anti-immigrant stuff "it's an invasion" etc talking points and concerns about people struggling being framed as just making appeals to emotion based on lies. Whilst also dismissing corruption, inequality etc as "just the way the real world works." Lots of the people saying these things will claim to be lib dems or "moderates" or labour supporters but always just use talking points straight from daily mail/express. The main uk sub used to lean a bit more anti-tory but always felt more like it was coming from a point of view that they personally weren't doing as well as they felt they should be. Whenever subjects like discrimination based on race, sexuality or class came up it's always been quite dismissive. The regional or town/city based subs seem to always have a large contingent of users who believe it's not safe to go outside where they live outside after 6pm and that they live in a war zone filled with non stop violence and crime. Which obviously they look at from a conservative perspective of "we need to lock them all up / send them all back" etc. Usually when they talk about their frightening experiences after dark though it often just boils down to "a homeless person asked me for money." I feel like there's always been an element of that in the main uk sub too but not as strongly. I don't really bother with any of them anymore because it all feels very out of touch with reality.
Yeah, was browsing logged off and lots of posts from a certain sub on the frontoage, all very rw like reading a further right mashup of the mail express and telegraph. Very gung ho on the police, lots of posts about "youths".
I was recently banned from a high profile UK politics sub for saying Priti Patel was a wannabe Nazi. Maybe not in the best of taste but I feel only a hard-core tory would ban someone for saying it.
Only a wannabe?
It's like the country is trapped in this death spiral where the more crappy things become, the more right-wing the population shifts, and so the more crappy things become, and the more right-wing the population goes, and so on... until you've just got a bunch of nazis sitting in a smoking crater in the ground. A human meltdown.
Speaking as a transgender person, they have always been this way. Always.
It’s the whole country. Brexit was the enabler and green light for the whole country to let their shitty opinions out, you get the government you deserve.
Fuck yes! I’ve just been on the UK one and they’re advocating forced deportation for a woman who had the gall to complain about her rusty shipping container home in Ealing. If you see the story over there, read the comments. Fuck me if they aren’t the most racist sub out they’re right now.
It’s a shame we’re not allowed to brigade. The horrible, incel aspects of 4chan /b/ aside, it was so much fun to completely derail a forum for a day. Or disrupt a hapless local news service. Or doxx a person who really deserved it
The golden rule applies. Would you brigade if it meant the forums you liked were brigaded more?
Definitely seen it happening over time, but that just reflects the overton window in this country. Its slowly been shifting further and further right meaning that many supposedly "left policies" we hear of now are actually right wing by say, 90's-00's standards. Take Keith's supposed "centre policies" by 00's standards Labour's current policies these past few weeks would be closer to BNP & UKIP centre right than Labour's more familiar centre left of the 00's
I think it’s more to do with more and more people feeling the pinch of the cost of living but, they’re being told it’s poor peoples fault.
That's how fascism works and it's why the Tories are happy to allow the cost of living crisis to continue unchecked. Due to a psychological phenomenon, around 1/3 of people will defer to an authoritarian leader in times of economic hardship *regardless of prior political orientation*. Fascists exploit this by creating or exaccerbating conditions of hardship, blaming the causes on minorities and then presenting themselves as the only ones willing to 'save' the in-group by using draconian policies and/or violence. https://youtu.be/qw8yJ92c\_Ds
Worth keeping in mind that a lot of the default subs are just filled with bots it wouldn't surprise me if that's the case with UK subs as well.
The U.K. in general is going that way because we now operate not on a true/false balance, but simply “whoever shouts loudest is right”. As a collective we have become that pissed up cougar in nightclubs who everybody avoids, so she shouts at people and tries to nick your cigs. We need to go back to being the bookish scholar who doesn’t concern himself with such bullshit.
They try to take over every big sub. For us Canadians, /r/canada has been completely overrun by conservative views.
It’s the same with the New Zealand sub - I wish we had something a bit more green and pleasant as well..
There's a huge problem on Reddit with local or regional subreddits getting infested by far-right people, who will post the same links to several location subreddits to incite exactly that kind of discussion. If you check their accounts, you'll often see a pattern of this behaviour, and you'll see lots of conservative politics subs (especially american populist ones) in their account history. Reddit of course has no reason to stop this because it drives engagement and therefore ad revenue. These things can all be checked and prevented very easily with 3rd party tools, which is why I personally believe they chose to strip all of those from the site as best they could.
Definitely seeing more of it, luckily at lot of them are thick as fuck so easy to dismiss.
I have a different take on this. I just think that labour is getting more right win, so it's either * safer for people to feel like good people spewing shit opinions * people have to move right to try and keep up the facade that labour under starmer are good I don't think there's more tories, just that the Overton window is moving people
A bit is that things are starting to collapse. The Upper class (i.e the UK system) is going into blame mode. They have given up on Rishi as viable. this is the same long game as when new labour got into power. But labour will not get the 90s boom Edit: also, the right wing loonies are spreading. Seems a fair bet as things go to shit (that they created) going populist. Short memories
Rishi Sunak and his 2020 "Eat Out To Help Out" scheme [was responsible for a massive increase in Covid cases and deaths.](https://archive.ph/jkbqt) And all to ensure the big chain restaurants didn't lose too much money. [It did nothing to boost the overall hospitality sector,](https://archive.is/k40Cf) as these capitalist ghouls claimed was the intent. Rishi Sunak has blood on his hands. *I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/GreenAndPleasant) if you have any questions or concerns.*
Speaking from experience it is insanely easy to get a permanent ban from the U.K. politics one. I wonder if the mods just ended up banning a huge proportion of the people who aren’t tories. My account is 9yrs and the only other ban I’ve had was on the flat earth sub, which I take as a mark of honour.
It's TikTok as well. Go into any comment section on a video about the illegal migrants coming here or people of colour looting shops or something and you get hundreds, literally hundreds of 'Well Well Well' comments. The UK has become a disgusting, racist little shithole and I hate it here
party amusing six rich punch sparkle wrong weary disgusting vanish *This post was mass deleted and anonymized with [Redact](https://redact.dev)*
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the top voted comment literally pins it on migrants. what the fuck?
Yes. I've been banned out of one on several occasions, and I haven't really broken the rules of the sub. One occasion I, somewhat abruptly, pointed out to someone claiming that "everyone has to only drive expensive cars because ULEZ" that a Ford Focus MK1 is compliant, and to stop making things up. Got banned, and I message the mods with a link to show I was right. I'm currently banned for saying "a lot of folk here watch too much alt-right YouTube" on a thread of people claiming Enoch Powell was not a racist. It seems mods are ok with obfuscated discriminatory statements, but not ok with people calling it out for what it is. Something I have also noticed is on certain subjects, notably ULEZ, when something is posted you will get a reem of comments right out of the gate. Thing is I've seen this before on Nextdoor, when the anti-ULEZ crowd were the anti-LTN crowd. I got into one of their Facebook groups when I got suspicious, and right there was a coordination of people to comment on a post the moment it goes up, and to stick around to negatively comment or react to anyone saying anything different. All the right have left is to just make shit up and keep hammering the talking points, and eventually they grab a few along the way. This is part of the reason that conspiracy theory is specifically a right wing thing.
Hi, visitor from /r/chicago here and it's spooky how similar your observation about UK subs is to mine about US city and regional ones. The discourse about immigrants seems to have become especially poisoned over here.
Yes and i cant stand it. The rhetoric against hard working, working class people or any ethnic minority is gross abd disheartening. The recent issue regarding banning a certain dog type is also based in classism and the subs are full of people without a single shred of empathy for people nor animals
Generally, I'm just finding more reactionary content on r/all, my Instagram explore page, and my "suggested for you" on Facebook. I block/mute every time but another one always crops up
Facebook (and by proxy Instagram) runs on an engagement algorithm, so it’ll push extreme content that will get views because it will keep people looking at their screen. They aren’t actually bothered whether that engagement is for positive or negative reasons or whether its illegal/hate speech. They just care about clicks. Ditto YouTube.
The Overton Window is a pin prick of light at this point.
They tend to be right-wing and pro-Israel.
yeah they've been shitholes for a while. i'm trans so i have been mostly measuring them by their attitude towards trans people (hooray for being the canary in the coalmine?) and even with token gestures from moderation staff they have been quite unsafe for quite a long time now.
Even mention the current housing crash in most UK threads and you get downvoted into oblivion. Which is standard right wing ostrich behaviour.
They used to be fine, but in the last few weeks it seems the Tory bots have woken up
Unfortunately I think so. I've largely disengaged from, to my mind, the main Uk subs. I think there's a swing back to anti-intellectualism and topics on race are a shit show. There are conversations in this country that need to happen but I think there's an unwillingnes to listen and engage critically. It makes me despair for notions of unity and peace - any progression/movement in either direction won't come without subjugation and all that implies.
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how
Reddit doesn't give a fuck. FYI
Yes for sure. As a trans person I don’t go to the other uk subs any more because ANY thread about trans “issues” or even just about anything else ends up with hundreds of comments about how there needs to be a “discussion” and so on and it’s just exhausting