I don’t follow Reddit regularly, but it appears on my Popurls feed aggregator page.
Anyhow, there’s always been a strong anti-American bias among its users, but this takes the cake. A story about rape and torture in the Congo. Whose fault is it, according to Reddit users? Not the Congolese, who are committing these heinous acts. Not the Belgians, with their brutal colonial legacy. Nope, it’s the Americans. Why? Because the Americans are EEEEEEEVIL.
Sigh.
Reddit has a sort of hive-mind culture that has a big influence on new submissions, and thus what gets on the front page. While there are always exceptions, here is a summary of what this group believes:
Fiscally left-leaning
Socially libertarian, highly concerned about privacy
Foreign redditors are anti-American
American redditors feel guilty about American imperialism
Anti-war
Frequently calls out Israel on human rights violations against Palestinians
Frequently condemns Britain for turning into an Orwellian “police state”
Pro LGBT rights
Granted, I’ve gotten pretty good at filtering out headlines that I think are obviously biased, and I’ve unsubscribed from the echo-tunnel subreddits like /r/atheism. I go to Reddit for the huge number of new links per hour, and I take everything the community says with a grain of salt.
The Reddit hivemind is what you make of it: If you want to see X, you can find plenty of people there who advocate X. It’s as simple as that.