It's one thing for a social media company like reddit to play host to various unseemly communities, as it has over the years (to put it VERY lightly- we're not even going to link out to examples, as they are very easy to find but very hard to unsee.) But it's an entirely different one for the company's algorithm to choose to promote toxic subreddits, which appears to be the case for the site's climate "skeptic" community.
The biggest communities on reddit, known as subreddits, tend to have relatively strict rules about what kind of content can be posted, so for example reddit.com/r/science only allows links to new peer-reviewed studies, or credible news coverage of them. As a result, the content it shows over 27 million subscribers is consistently free from climate disinformation, and has been for the decade these content quality controls have been in place.
But other subreddits have different rules, like the aptly named /r/politics, which instituted basic standards that, in practice, exclude the spammy, often-debunked, conspiracy-ridden URLs that play host to most climate disinformation, protecting some 8 million subscribers.
Unfortunately though, because each community is ruled entirely by whoever created it, that means that if a subreddit were built instead to play host to climate disinformation, they could do that, and of course they have.
The /r/climateskeptics community has grown quite slowly over the past 10+ years, now totalling over 30,000 subscribers- though actual engagement is far lower, with the top posts ever netting only hundreds of upvotes. Interestingly, the peak for the subreddit seems to have been between September 2019 and May of 2020, with 48 of its top 50 posts ever coming from that time period, a pattern that seems consistent for the next 100 or so posts, and not until the net upvotes reach just a couple hundred do more recent posts begin appearing.
Which definitely suggests that the algorithm was, for a time, heavily promoting the subreddit to users who aren't normally subscribed and upvoting there.
And the statistics show an unprecedented and dramatic explosion of subscribers, starting in January of 2019, around when the community first hit 10,000 subscribers. It then jumped to 28,000 by March of 2020 and has returned to a much more gradual increase since then. Similarly, there was a spike in comments per day in December of 2019, and a notable increase in posts per day during the September 2019-March 2020 time period.
Since then, though, things are back to "normal", and in the last year, top posts are still coming from a dedicated handful of users obsessed with Greta and other memetic content, and only netting a couple hundred upvotes and a few dozen comments apiece. (Hardly the viral disinfo load carried by Twitter or Facebook.)
Recently though, there seems to be a real uptick in content getting once again pushed out past the walls of the community's subscribers, as in multiple posts over the past week, users have commented to complain that the climate disinformation on the page is being pushed into their feeds, despite their not being subscribed.
The frustration here isn't exactly that tons of reddit users will fall for the disinfo- in fact, more often they're (justly) mocking the handful of users there that do the bulk of the posting, leading to lots of reminders of the community's only rule, of not making fun of the community (for being a bunch of dingdongs in denial and not intellectuals discussing legitimate science, as everyone quickly and easily notices upon engagement.)
The annoying part is that reddit already has the tools to deal with communities that are toxic and harmful, quarantining them to limit exposure, before banning them all together.
Given that /r/climateskeptics moderators have all but given up, with two exceptions added in October of 2021 as others got bored and stopped paying attention to the subreddit, it's not exactly a thriving community on its own. But when reddit's algorithm, apparently of its own volition, decided to start sending new potential recruits their direction, it's adding some quite unnecessary fuel to the disinformation fire that's keeping the climate hot.
And before anyone suggests it's a good thing reddit is constantly exposing people to disinformation because some of those people might inject some reality into the community, unfortunately, as we've discussed before, feeding the trolls doesn't actually turn them back into rational people, it just gives them exactly the engagement they desire.