MORE than ever before, the online armies of political candidates are playing a crucial role in marshalling support, shaping narratives and spreading information.

On social news site Reddit, which attracts more than 230 million users every month, supporters of Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump and Democratic candidates Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders wage constant battle.

Sub-communities dedicated to the candidates, known as “subreddits”, have become defacto campaign hubs, leveraging the massive power of social media in an age where trust in the mainstream press is at an all-time low.

More than 230,000 people have subscribed to /r/SandersForPresident, compared with around 14,000 for /r/HillaryClinton, while /r/The_Donald — an unruly, energetic, often deliberately offensive community — has more than 130,000 subscribers.

“The Bernie Sanders Reddit is very much working in concert with the Sanders campaign organisation,” Micah L Sifry, co-founder of Personal Democracy Media, told The New York Times last month. “The Sanders people have strategically realised this is an asset.”

“In Trump’s case, none of that support is being developed. [If anything] the internet maybe shows the latent capacity of Trump supporters. They’re there, and they might be excited to be given something to do.”

At any given time there can be up to 10,000 people active on the Trump and Sanders subreddits, suggesting strong organic support for both. Hillary Clinton, however, has come under fire for paying $US1 million to fund an army of commenters to “correct” anti-Hillary comments on Facebook, Reddit and Instagram.

“It is meant to appear to be coming organically from people and their social media networks in a groundswell of activism, when in fact it is highly paid and highly tactical,” Brian Donahue, chief executive of the consulting firm Craft Media/Digital told the LA Times.

“That is what the Clinton campaign has always been about. It runs the risk of being exactly what their opponents accuse them of being: a campaign that appears to be populist but is a smokescreen that is paid and brought to you by lifetime political operatives and high-level consultants.”

On /r/The_Donald in particular, users have pivoted from non-stop attacks on Republican rival Ted Cruz, who some believe to be the infamous Zodiac Killer who terrorised California in the ‘60s and ‘70s (despite Cruz being born after the final murder), to attacking Clinton.

More than any other community, /r/The_Donald is characterised by rapid-fire posting of memes, insults, inside jokes and slang (users refer to each other as “centipedes” and repeat Trump phrases such as “MAGA” and “build the wall”), collectively referred to as “s***posting”.

The goal is for the images or articles to “reach /r/all”. In other words, if a submission receives enough votes it will be visible to people browsing the catch-all section of Reddit, and not just users who have signed up to view content from their community.

Lately, users have taken it upon themselves to spread a photograph of Clinton with former Ku Klux Klan member Robert Byrd as a political statement, after claims the Clinton campaign was attempting to have the photo removed from the internet.

Trump came under fire early in the campaign after he was endorsed by notorious white supremacist David Duke, and did not immediately disavow him when asked by a journalist at a press conference.

The original photo of Clinton and Byrd was taken in 2004. Byrd, who died in 2010, was a member of the Ku Klux Klan in the 1940s and helped set up its chapter in Sophia, West Virginia.

However, he claimed to have left the hate group after “about a year”, and repeatedly apologised for his membership throughout his political career as a Senator, Snopes reported.

That hasn’t stopped Trump supporters from turning their Photoshop skills to good use, posting endless variations and modifications of the image over the past week.

Here is the original:

It then started with basic Photoshop:

Others began to get more creative:

Then it just started getting silly:

Check out some other creations below: