Ok so idk if this is the most appropriate place to post this, but are the extreme views and statement we see on these platforms really just “bots” and “internet noise” are these genuinely the worst parts of humanity?
For context/elaborating on it, I kinda drifted off from lemmy to reddit due to lack of content here and holee fuck, its just horrifying, the amount of pro genocidal statements and cheers for extremism genuinely makes me feel at extreme unease, but it also makes me ask a question. I come from a conservative southasian society and whenever you bring up topics like treatment of minorities, lgbtq+ rights, feminism etc, people normally dont comment on this stuff or make a “harmless joke” out of it, but seeing reddit pages of the same grp of ppl it makes me genuinely feel that these guys hold on to genuinely insane beliefs, and are just afraid to present it to anyone in person…
Not sure what corners of Reddit you’re browsing, but from what I’ve seen on r/all, the active majority don’t make extremist statements and don’t make jokes out of minorities (with the exception of the weird “women am I right” on r/SipsTea). In fact, Reddit is pretty leftist by US standards, considering USians are the majority of active posters and commenters.
However, it does have a penchant for ridiculing both Pakistanis and Indians — which, though, is lately supported by Indians themselves posting videos of uncivil behaviour on r/indianrailways and such. Plus, Indians and Pakistanis on Reddit do disparage and dismiss each other — idk about any particularly extremist sentiment. But this disparagement is typically limited to Indian subreddits, which mostly consist of ethnic Indians — judging by the prevalence of Hindi — who I guess have strong feelings on the matter (dunno about Pakistani subs, as I haven’t seen them).
Also, Reddit is implementing automated moderation lately, which does stuff like detecting bigotry based on nationality. This moderation is very stupid and ineffective so far, as it removes one comment and issues a warning, while hundreds of comments with the same sentiment are visible plain as day, but don’t contain the same keywords. Meanwhile many completely innocuous comments are getting hidden because the automation felt wonky about them.
You are right that the european/US side of reddit is uhmm decently left leaning (apart from the strange fetish for israel, not sure how many of them are bots), but the indian side (the one which was the most prevalent in my feed) was absolutely horrifying; i perhaps should have made the distinction clear hehe in my original post