An interesting investigative story was published today by Pirate Wires. The author uncovers how propaganda being sent out by dozens of designated terrorist groups including Hamas and Hezbollah have their messages pushed onto Reddit by a group that has worked behind the scenes to take over a number of subreddit forums, including some that are ostensibly not about politics at all.

The pipeline of propaganda starts with terror groups who publish material which gets picked up by a Telegram channel called the Resistance News Network.

Screenshots I obtained seem to indicate that RNN pulls content from a color-coded list of Telegram channels run by US-designated foreign terror organizations headquartered across the Middle East. Many of these channels aren’t available in the US due to restrictions on terror-related content, so RNN’s translation and re-posting of the content represents an effective — if illegal — workaround of US terror law.

While not the sole distributor of content produced by foreign terror groups, RNN is the main one. It aggregates and distributes content from US-designated groups in Israel-Palestine, including Hamas...Palestinian Islamic Jihad...Martyr Abu Mustafa Brigades, the armed wing of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP)...and many more. In Iraq, RNN pulls from around a dozen channels, including Kataeb Hezbollah, which has engaged in a sustained campaign of rocket and drone attacks against US bases and assets in the region, and Scream of Al-Quds Brigades, which is part of the Islamic Resistance in Iraq. In Yemen, RNN aggregates at least six channels of major terror groups, including the Houthis.

So these posts, memes, etc. get sent out by terror groups and picked up and translated by RNN. But the last step is delivering those messages into Reddit forums. This is done by a group dubbed the r/Palestine network which operates behind the scenes to take over moderation of certain Reddit forums, including some popular ones that originally had no connection to Middle East politics.

The backbone of the r/Palestine network is a group of moderators who control dozens of overlapping subreddits, with r/Palestine as the central hub. These users co-moderate the core group of ideological subreddits, like r/IsraelCrimes, r/palestinenews, and r/ApartheidIsrael, where the content is dedicated to intensive and sustained anti-Israel messaging...

Much of the network’s influence lies in popular subreddits that, nominally, have nothing to do with Israel. For example, u/Sabbah, the highly influential member of the network mentioned previously, moderates topically relevant subreddits like r/Palestine, r/IsraelCrimes, r/Palestinians, r/palestinenews, r/ApartheidIsrael, and r/Panarab. However, Sabbah also moderates r/Documentaries, r/therewasanattempt, r/PublicFreakout, r/IRLEasterEggs, r/ToiletPaperUSA, r/Thatsactuallyverycool and r/boringdystopia — a cluster of unrelated, large subreddits that have been captured by the network...

r/therewasanattempt, a subreddit originally meant for funny ‘fail’ content, and which has over 7 million members, features as its main banner an archery target in the colors of the Palestinian flag with the words “Free Palestine” ringed around it and Israel in the bull’s eye. (The subreddit’s icon is this same target with the Israel bull’s eye.) The main banner previously featured the phrase “From the River to the sea, Palestine will be Free.”

The same group of mods has also taken over the r/Documentaries subreddit which has 20 million members. The mods post and upvote a steady stream of anti-Israel content along with the other documentaries featured in the space. In all, a network of about 30 moderators control about 110 subreddits of various size. All of their activity is organized on a Discord which is constantly looking for new places to place terrorist propaganda.

The central locus of the network is a 270,000-member subreddit called r/Palestine. A Discord server with the same name functions as command-and-control for the r/Palestine network, and is promoted prominently on the subreddit. On the Discord — whose new members must undergo an ideological purity test consisting of questions about their views on Israel, Zionism and October 7 — a “Reddit task force” channel coordinates posting to Reddit, identifying “comments sections that need more pro Palestinian commentary,” mass upvoting of anti-Israel posts, and downvoting of pro-Israel posts (a practice known as “vote brigading”). The Discord has separate task forces for Quora, TikTok, Instagram, X, and Wikipedia.

So if you were wondering how Hamas suddenly became a favorite topic of every left-wing college student and a focus of social media discussion, this is probably part of the answer. Reddit has been made aware of what this group of politically motivate moderators is doing on the site but their trust and safety team has brushed it off and refused to take any action. Terrorist propaganda is just fine with Reddit it seems.