For months now, Reddit has firmly backed Bernie Sanders. The massive community has been a huge factor in his online virality.
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Reddit users were spamming pro-Bernie memes way before your annoying Facebook friend was. The site held large fundraising campaigns for the candidate, and its users have acted as influencers on other social-media platforms.
But as Sanders’ campaign wanes, Bernie supporters are becoming less active on the site. This leaves yawning window for the folks at Donald Trump’s subreddit to take over the politics of Reddit—and they appear to be doing just that.
If you’ve recently been on Reddit’s “All” section—that’s the page that lists the most popular posts for the entire site, with top-10 posts typically getting over 5,000 “upvotes”—you’ll probably come to the conclusion that the site has made a political shift. While pro-Sanders posts used to dominate, the front page is now thick with posts from subscribers to r/the_donald, Trump’s subreddit.
This is a big deal: Political developments on Reddit aren’t just inconsequential slices of Internet culture. Reddit acts as the plankton of the online ecosystem, with larger fish, from Buzzfeed to the 9 p.m. news, feeding off content that originates on the site.
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The new regime looks very different than the old. While Berniebros would mainly post biased articles that forecast a Sanders victory, Trump supporters like to frequently challenge the rest of Reddit.
The_donald even had a fleeting war with r/sweden, or Sweddit, after a Donald user posted a picture comparing the shape of Sweden to a penis. The two sides began posting pictures and memes attacking the other side and mass upvoting them to the “all” section. The rest of Reddit joined in, mainly on Sweddit’s side and was able to defeat the_donald by upvoting Sweden posts and downvoting Trump posts.
The_donald has risen to become the second-most-active subreddit on the site. Its users are incredibly savvy about gaming Reddit’s voting system. The moderators regularly get posts to the front page of Reddit by strategically stickying select posts to give them more traction and cycling posts through the sticky rotation.
And Trump support is not quarantined to the_donald. They are making inroads into r/politics, the site’s general political discussion group, which has been virulently pro-Sanders since he announced his campaign. Vaguely supportive Trump posts have been getting traction on the subreddit, spurring interesting conversations about the site’s politics.
Further evidence :
There are certain overlaps between Trump and Bernie’s policies that Trump supporters can exploit as they seek to take over Sanders’ real estate on Reddit, especially when it comes to trade deals and marijuana. The_donald posters are using these issues to surreptitiously get support from Redditors. The two camps also, of course, bond over their hatred of Hillary Clinton.
The_donald has had a meteoric rise making its presence known, despite the small number of subscribers (120,000 members compared with the 3 million in r/politics). If Redditors wants to stop this trend, they must learn from the mistakes of the GOP, and organize the anti-Trumpers to stop their rise.
But we all know how well that works every time its attempted.
