Right-wing sites funded by Russia's Internet Research Agency were used to target /r/The_Donald subreddit where the sites' stories were shared thousands of times
Ryan Broderick / BuzzFeed : Tweets: @buzzfeednews and @broderick Tweets: @buzzfeednews : Reddit's largest pro-Trump subreddit, r/The_Donald, appears to have been targeted by Russian propaganda for years http://www.buzzfeed.com/... Ryan Broderick / @broderick : Five redditors have emailed me in the last hour to tell me that all submissions of my article are being removed or flagged as “off-topic” by the mods of r/Politics. My article also now has an update from Reddit. All four Russia-linked domains were banned. http://www.buzzfeednews.com/ ... http://twitter.com/...
Context & Ripple Effects
This lands mid-arc: in March, Reddit said it had removed hundreds of Russian propaganda accounts while insisting few ads ran on its platform, then published the full roster of 944 suspected IRA accounts, most with zero karma. The BuzzFeed reporting reframes that cleanup — the IRA wasn't just running sockpuppets, it was funding real-looking right-wing websites whose stories organically spread thousands of times inside r/The_Donald.
The next day's New York Times examination of USAReally shows what those IRA-funded outlets looked like up close: overtly pro-Kremlin, pro-Trump content depicting a declining America, seeded into the same subreddit. The mechanism matters because it survives account purges — ban the puppet, and the site it linked to keeps circulating through genuine users.
First-order effects
- Reddit banned all four Russia-linked domains named in the report, cutting off the IRA-funded sites' distribution path into the platform.
- r/The_Donald's moderators face immediate scrutiny over why stories from these domains accumulated thousands of shares unchecked, and coverage of the story itself gets flagged as 'off-topic' by r/Politics moderators within hours.
Second-order effects
- Domain-level bans push the burden onto other platforms and aggregators to maintain their own blocklists of IRA-linked outlets, since removing accounts no longer removes the content source.
- Sustained evidence that its largest pro-Trump community was an IRA target strengthens the case inside Reddit for structural action against the subreddit itself, not just individual accounts or domains.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, influence operations migrate down the enforcement ladder — from fake accounts, to funded pseudo-news sites, to organic communities, and eventually into comment sections on mainstream news outlets as researchers documented by 2021.
- Reddit's trajectory from account removals in 2018 to banning r/The_Donald outright in 2020 points toward platforms treating repeat-offender communities, not just bad actors, as the unit of moderation.
The trend: Platform enforcement is displacing state-backed influence operations from fake accounts toward funded websites and authentic communities, forcing moderation to move up from actors to infrastructure.