Ep. 220 - We Need To Talk About Reddit

After years of dodging emails about the internal politics of the country's largest subreddit, r/Canada, Jesse finally jumps down the weirdo-message-board rabbit hole.

Nearly 340k people are subscribed to r/Canada, with many using it as a primary source of national news. This past week, private messages were leaked between two of the subreddit's moderators, in which one moderator named u/Perma wrote that they were "slowly becoming" a white nationalist.

Freelance journalist and CANADALAND contributor, Evan Balgord joins Jesse to get a sense of how one of Canada's biggest informal, "non-partisan" news platforms begun skewing (alt)right and how Reddit influences mainstream media (and politics).

Jesse also speaks to the person responsible for leaking the conversation, "Neil" AKA u/UsedToDonateBlood, the founding moderator of r/OnGuardForThee — the breakout subreddit pushing back against the "censorious," and increasingly "alt-right" editorial slant of r/Canada. An earlier version of this episode made reference to a Justin Trudeau AMA on r/CanadaPolitics. This was in fact an April Fool's hoax.

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