/r/conservative lost over a million "users" in the last day because they were Russian bots
Fascinating writeup: https://www.reddit.com/r/dataisbeautiful/comments/1p1vx9n/oc_nearly_every_day_two_users_on_rconservative/
Basically what happened was that someone noticed r/conservative had most of its content posted by only two accounts. They tracked it for a while and then noticed that the accounts suddenly stopped posting at exactly the same time Moscow lost power for 24 hours due to Ukrainian drone strikes and then started up again as soon as they regained power.
Reddit investigated and now it looks like MOST posters on r/conservative were Russian bots and more than a million have been culled.
Apparently the bots have been deliberately pushing topics like trans kids in sports over and over again to distract people. This is *remarkably* similar to what certain posters here have been posting.
(posted early accidentally).
Anyway, it looks like reddit finally removed a lot of the bots. The post I linked was the initial catalyst six months ago, the followup stuff just happened a day or so ago.