Star Wars Enjoyer

maybe now’s a good time to share that Reddit has always had rampant Russophobia. Back in 2016 when the Enough Trump Spam subreddit was made, they added “no xenophobia” to their rules. but every other post was xenophobic towards either Russia, China, or the DPRK. Hell, I got like a thousand downvotes on a comment where I corrected the OP on the reach of DPRK’s missiles (it was one of those “oh no, the north koreans are going to nuke us next week” posts), and nearly all of the thousands of comments were calling me a Russian bot, or using slurs to insult me.

Russophobia was a big part of the Democrat’s strategy against Trump in that election, claiming that Russia helped Trump win and whatnot. Russophobia is at this point, perhaps, the oldest propagandist tool used by the American state. Ever since the revolution in Russia, and honestly even before it, they scaremongered supporters into supporting whatever it was the politicians or the media wanted them to support, using Russia, the Soviet Union, or Communism (which was tied to the Soviets for them) as the leverage. Black people want rights? can’t do that, that’s communism, and look at what’s going on in the evil USSR. Workers want rights? can’t do that, the evil USSR. so on, so forth. It’s very disheartening that they still use this tactic today, but it’s even more disheartening that in the information age, where anyone can simply look the information up and disprove the propaganda, people still eat the tactic up like day-old fries.

You should probably find some active users to appoint as moderators, to reduce your workload.

If you explain why the source isn’t trustable, that’ll work for some people. But the people who wanna shout “but china bad” at the mear mention of it will just ignore that. So, ultimately - and unfortunate as it may be - this is one of the things that a hard stance must be taken on, and will likely be disrupting to your community. I.E. you’re gonna have to remove any and all posts with these sources, and possibly ban users who repeatedly try to use these sources.

we decided against doing IP bans because it could keep users who use VPNs from logging in, since VPN IPs aren’t always unique. I just banned this person for being a troll, but I’m not entirely sure if they’re banned from the main branch or just Lemmygrad. I banned this person before for commenting a death threat on a main branch post. I don’t remember how to do @s, but it might be worth getting the attention of one of the main branch admins for this.