Context
Artificial Intelligence (AI) holds immense promise, but it has often been misused by online news media, with companies employing sophisticated algorithms to maximize profits by delivering hyper-tailored and highly appealing news to their audiences. This has flooded consumers with biased, one-sided narratives that frequently compromise factual accuracy, enhance political polarization, and contribute to social discord.
In response to this challenge, MIT Professor Max Tegmark founded the Improve the News Foundation (ITN) in 2020 as an apolitical nonprofit dedicated to ameliorating the online news environment. In mid-2023, ITN launched Verity, a free, independent digital publication that aims to empower people to learn the full, nuanced truth behind every major news story.
Social Media Objectives
In 2023, Verity began looking for new ways to organically expand our reader base. To achieve this, we decided to focus on Reddit, since, unlike some social media platforms, Reddit thrives on authenticity and deep conversation on numerous topics by diverse communities, making it an ideal match for Verity’s nuanced and impartial news content.
Our objectives for the end of that year were:
Our approach to organic expansion on Reddit centered on careful community mapping and authentic engagement as well as adaptation and optimization while closely abiding by the platform’s rules, community guidance, and so-called “Reddiquette."
Step 1: Community Mapping; Finding Subreddits
We conducted an in-depth analysis of Reddit, identifying over 500+ subreddits where discussions aligned with Verity’s mission—ranging from r/politics and r/climate to niche communities like r/technology and r/unitednations. We segmented these communities by political leanings— right, left, and neutral— and topical interests to ensure balanced outreach in macro and micro-communities. For example, r/unitednations is a community that is focused on achieving meaningful debates about the United Nations and its member states. As a fast-growing subreddit that doubled its subscribers in the last two months, the community genuinely fosters critical thinking based on facts and narratives and is therefore an ideal place for sharing Verity stories.
Step 2: Authentic Engagement; Joining Subreddits
Our team adopted a “participate first, post second” strategy. Rather than pushing links, we became active members of each subreddit, immersing ourselves by commenting, upvoting, and contributing meaningfully to daily conversations. Our intent was always to have personal and direct interactions with Redditors, fostering well-informed discussions about our stories. When sharing Verity content, we tailored each post to fit the subreddit’s culture. We also focused on trending topics, such as Israel-Palestine, Russia-Ukraine, AI governance, and transgender issues. Some specific examples:
When we noticed that Redditors who leaned to either extreme were more interactive, we refocused our tactics to target these people in even more niche subreddits.
Phase 3: Adaptation & Optimization
Reddit’s strict moderation led to some challenges, despite our best efforts to closely observe the platform’s rules and guidelines. Considering feedback from other community members and moderators, we refined our approach by:
Our Reddit efforts delivered results that far exceeded expectations. In 2024, we achieved:
We also earned 33.7K website views directly from 31.8K Redditors - from 1.7K in Q3 2023 to 13.5K in Q4 2024 (694% increase). This is an understatement, considering the harder-to-measure indirect views and visits from friends of Redditors who accessed the website through other social media platforms and backlinks. Reddit users also spent 51% more time on our site than the average visitor—3 minutes and 36 seconds compared to 2 minutes and 23 seconds—demonstrating deeper engagement and interest.
Beyond the numbers, we earned the audience's trust. Redditors praised Verity’s unbiased reporting:
Even moderators took notice. The r/unitednations moderation team commended Verity’s commitment to minimal bias and invited us to post regularly. This led to the creation of Verity’s own subreddit, further expanding engagement.
A sentiment analysis by the Improve the News Foundation of the Reddit comments that we received confirmed a general positive reaction, indicating that users trust the information that they have received, perceiving it to be generally accurate, well-researched, and free from hidden agendas.
