Putting on my tinfoil hat a little here. I saw
this tweet (archive) which revealed that #Resistance favourite "Brooklyn Dad" (who currently has
a thread in the Proving Grounds) receives regular payments from the vehemently liberal "
Really American PAC".
This jogged something in my memory. There's an odd subreddit,
/r/reallyamerican (archive), which was created on 27 January of this year. Default layout and no description beyond "This group is about U.S. Politics". The content is your real basic pictures-of-political-tweets stuff, with a bit of non-political karma-farm posts (
1) (
2) (
3), and with a few exceptions the posts get low vote counts and few comments. There's still relatively few posts on the sub and it's possible to get right back to the original one in a few clicks. But some of its mods are prolific front-page posters.
My_Memes_Will_Cure_U (archive) has, at time of posting, over 19 million link karma,
esberat 3.1 million,
NRGpop 1.7 million, the others about half a million.
Hwhouston17 is a powermod with 75 modships, but the others don't mod any subreddits of note.
The founder and most prolific poster is mod
Powerfulwoman20 (archive), who's made some real high-scoring tweet screenshot posts on more mainstream subreddits. Some of this account's posts on /r/reallyamerican are political, but many others are generic "interesting" content (
1) (
2) (
3), which feels like an attempt to sneak the sub onto the front page. This account seems to mostly be operated by a bot. For example, they've made text comments like "
'd like to try to change the system peacefully through protest and policy makers who TRULY represent us... BUT 1/2" (sic)
(archive), which is a crude copypaste of
the top comment on an Imgur post of the same tweet screenshot, made a few days earlier
(archive). At random, other examples here (
Reddit) (
Imgur original, again, the top comment) and here (
Reddit) (
Imgur original, once again the top comment). Most glaringly of all, despite mostly having a liberal bent, the account once posted a pro-conservative comment on the death of Rush Limbaugh (
Reddit)
(archive) (
9gag original)
(archive), which suggests there isn't a human behind the posts.
An interesting exception to this account being a robot is one post it made on front page karma farm staple /r/nextfuckinglevel. In response to a call for new mod applicants, the account replied:
(this comment was quickly deleted and I can't find an archive-able form of it, so I've attached a screenshot.)
Ultimately I don't really have a smoking gun or conclusion, but this subreddit clearly feels like an op of some sort or other. Most likely, this Really American PAC is trying to get some astroturfing going via a mixture of botting and enlisting successful pile-em-high front page posters. Nothing really seems to be going on very intensely at the moment, but check back once we get closer to the US mid-term elections, perhaps.
Edit: sub
/r/NonPoliticalTwitter shares two mods in common with /r/reallyamerican (hwhouston517 and My_Memes_Will_Cure_U), and another mod of the former sub,
PoliticalFacepalm (archive), joined on 1 February and has posted to /r/reallyamerican. No comments at all, interestingly, just submissions.
www.reddit.com
