[eamon0989]

I follow r/europe and I have also noticed a huge change. What once seemed to be a pretty open subreddit appears to have turned into exactly what you mentioned, with vile comments on immigration and Islam on almost every thread.

I did start to wonder if people's viewpoint on immigration has changed as the narrative that Europe is "saturated" with immigrants seems to be being pushed a lot at them moment, but I have a feeling that the audience of Reddit and r/europe seems to be changing. I wish there was some way to know for sure.

[Macha]

I think a lot of Reddit's earlier userbase was more lefty types and that also overlaps with the group most annoyed by the API changes since they'd gotten used to what Reddit used to be. So more of the left wing users left, resulting in the attitude shift you're seeing. Even the right wing users on early reddit were more right-libertarian than right-conservative or alt-right initially - Ron Paul was one of the first political figures to have a big following there.

That said, there is also a shift to the right in real life, as seen by the rise of groups like AfD, Brothers of Italy or Sweden Democrats.

r/europe also has a bit of a weird history with this too. It started relatively left wing in the early days of reddit, drifting to the right until the mods started clamping down on the more overtly racist stuff. At this point, a lot of the posters involved moved to r/european, which sort of reset r/europe back leftward a bit again. But then r/european was banned around the same time as r/the_donald for much the same reasons, and those users drifted back into r/europe which shifted it to the right a second time.

[dkjaudyeqooe]

It's due to the extreme right wing and other opportunists fear mongering and inflaming people's grievances with an easy scapegoat that cannot defend itself.

Social media of all kinds are effective tools in this. Vilification of minorities works, it always has, but those who would exploit it haven't had access to the public forums required to promote it. Now they have.

Nuclear weapons won't destroy the earth, social media will.