This isn’t the first time they’ve done this. When the Ukraine war started, there was a lot of this going around, a ton of astroturfing, a ton of bans of accounts and subreddits. Reddit is one of the largest social media sites, and the one that has a culture of being “smarter” than all the others ones. One of the best ways to get people to blindly believe anything you say is to convince them that they are very intelligent for believing it. Redditors love that shit. It’s like the website was custom built to be an open mouthpiece for the US state department.