This was on the front page a day or 2 ago, right near the top:
It seemed... inorganic. And I'm not sure what the gold trim is on those posts. Other posts didn't have them.
[Speaking as a mod] Given the topic I'll be monitoring this thread carefully. As such, if anyone here is eager to either promote fascism (rule #1) or witch hunt (to point fingers towards other users based on assumptions or faulty reasoning - rule #1, rule #4): don't. Also remember that the topic of this community is Reddit, there's a lot of leeway for non-divisive off-topic but please don't go overboard.
And if anyone here has concerns that some other user is doing either thing, please use the report button, OK?
The yellow means the post or comment has received "gold." Basically, people paying to boost or highlight the post. Screams bot activity to me, or at the very least a very unsubtle propaganda post made by some underpaid Israeli keyboard warrior trying to further associate anti-Zionism to anti-Semitism.
propaganda post made by some underpaid Israeli keyboard warrior
Yes I have heard of this. They don't even need to be Israeli.
https://www.mintpressnews.com/pro-israel-trolls-mobbing-twitter-community-notes/286099/
https://forward.com/news/388259/shadowy-israeli-app-turns-american-jews-into-foot-soldiers-in-online-war/
The pictures themselves are fine. It's the fact that the posts are very similar, paid, and pushed to the front of a feed in a time when an ethnostate wearing the Jewish identity is carrying out a genocide on a captive population. It feels, as OP said, inorganic.
Of course the pictures could also be read as a reminder of what Jewish resistance really stood for, which would conversely carry a distinctly anti-Israel sentiment, and the optimist in me wants to believe that. I can't see the comments on the posts, so I have no way of knowing for sure.
[Speaking as a user] Yeah, it looks inorganic for me too. As another user said the gold trim signals that the post was gilded, gilding nowadays works like a "mega-upvote" and gives it that trim. It's possible that defenders of the Jewish genocide (Holocaust) and of the Palestinian genocide (the ongoing war) are dumping money in those posts, to promote their shitty discourses.
And that works really well in Reddit because the userbase there loves some oversimplification: they have a really hard time decoupling the Jewish people from the State of Israel.
The normal thing on Reddit is to parrot the imperial line and ban socialists and their subs. This leaves a political chasm where fascism can be normalized. It's usually not normalized so obviously as "look at these Nazis isn't it cool that meemaw met this genocidal fuck" though. Most fascism of the empire is already mostly normalized and these folks just push for it even more: scapegoating immigrants, creating forms of acceptable racism against out-groups, promoting privatization, demonizing socialists, justifying settler-colonialism for their "friends", blood & soil rhetoric, etc.
Two examples:
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Frothing-at-the-mouth blood & soil rhetoric premised on Russophobia and giving Ukrainians the "white" treatment.
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Pretending to care about Uyghurs while spending zero time researching it and only caring to the extent that they can hate China and fantasize about Balkanizing it.
Re: these particular posts, Reddit has been astroturfed for ages. In addition to oddly-timed posts, the dramatic difference in opinion and tone between large and established vs. and small or newer subreddits is massive. You'll see polar opposite levels of astroturfing between "worldpolitics" (fashy chauvinist opinions and banning the left on sight) and "fauxmoi" (filled with better opinions that are common among 20-30 year olds). It's kind of entertaining to explore why zoomers on a gossip subreddit are more politically informed and worldly than the "commenters" on a much larger subreddit dedicated to the topic. A lot of it does seem to be bots and left-punching directives from corporate.
Westerners only care when white people die. Despite racism against Slavic people, Ukraine was white-ified for purposes of Russophobia and NATO.
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