Ever since last year’s US Presidential election, there have been claims that Reddit’s /r/conspiracy subreddit has been “taken over” and utilised as a propaganda platform by Donald Trump supporters. There have even been claims that the /r/conspiracy moderation team has been actively suppressing theories that paint the current president in a negative light.

Originally, I didn’t want to touch this shite with a bargepole, simply because a) it seems to be an emotive issue, b) US politics has very little impact on me and c) there seems to be a lot of crazies on both sides. However, the drama kept raging on and on and curiosity eventually got the better of me in the end.

What I did.

On two separate occasions, I ran a script that compiled a list of usernames that had recently posted to /r/conspiracy. In the end, I was left with a list of 1,555 Reddit users that had participated in the subreddit in the past week or so. Using that list, I was able to compile a list of all of the subreddits that these users had posted to in the past.

The stats.

Out of the 1,555 /r/conspiracy users that were “surveyed”:

850 / 1,555 users had previously posted in the_donald subreddit. That’s 54.66%.

subreddit. That’s 54.66%. 244 of those 1,555 users had 50+ posts in the_donald .

. The average the_donald post count for the 850 “the_donald” users was 85.19.

post count for the 850 “the_donald” users was 85.19. The average the_donald post count for all 1,555 users was 30.11.

But what if we exclude the users that have less than 50 posts in /r/conspiracy? i.e. What if we try to remove anybody that might have been just “passing by”?

763 users had 50+ posts in /r/conspiracy.

449 of those 763 users had posted in the_donald . That’s 58.85%. These 449 users had an average of 99.13 posts in the_donald .

. That’s 58.85%. These 449 users had an average of 99.13 posts in . 148 of those 449 users had 50+ posts in the_donald .

. The 763 users with 50+ posts in /r/conspiracy had an average of 36.72 posts in /r/the_donald.

Subreddit Overlaps.

I also compiled each user’s subreddit posting history into one big combined list. These 1,555 /r/conspiracy users had the following “combined post count” in the following subreddits:

conspiracy – 236,182 (obviously). the_donald – 72,412 politics – 69,012 worldpolitics – 5,396 sandersforpresident – 4,918 wayofthebern – 4,839 enoughtrumpspam – 3,596 wikileaks – 3,232 asktrumpsupporters – 3,039 libertarian – 3,033 hillaryforprison – 2,430 askthe_donald – 1,681 theredpill – 1,477 political_revolution – 1,456 conservative – 1,298

Note that I purposely excluded subreddits such as pics, funny, hockey, videos, etc, as they don’t really mean anything in this case.

So there you go – make your own conclusions.