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You don't need half of the battalion to be commissars. All the political actors here lean the same way. That's enough to push the discourse in a certain direction by only allowing the extremes of one side.
Yes, cult dynamics happen so easily in online spaces
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This, so much. This is how it works everywhere. In academia, everyone is broadly leftish but mostly apolitical. A small minority of far-left is not only tolerated & rarely challenged, but is allowed & financed to actively proselytise. Anything remotely right is ostracised or at best tolerated as long as its just talk among colleagues. If you try to point this out, you will be reminded "well, the last inequality retreat was very badly attended, so clearly we need to Do Better". The fact that this inequality retreat was actively financed by the university, mostly peddles extremely shoddy science that wouldn't be tolerated otherwise and that there is absolutely nothing remotely comparable that the average person would consider right does not even occur to them.
It's the same on reddit; I'm fairly confident that a) the great majority of the other mods, if not all of them, are still broadly left-leaning b) critically, the non-political mods almost never challenge the political mods, and almost all political mod actions are broadly the left cracking down on the right, never the other way around.
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