Reddit has had an issue with being a platform of public manipulation for a while. This is not new, it’s just much more noticeable now, and thus a lot less effective.
Reddit was always full of reposts and content yoinked from other sites, it’s just that the content taken from other sites was curated. There was also a fair amount of original content mixed in. The people who bothered to do the free labor of curating content from other sites or creating original content, have largely left or retreated to smaller subreddits.
Where as before the influence and marketing campaigns were mixed in with genuine/well curated content, now they are 90% of what is left. Even their content is worse than it used to be since it’s largely just LLM generated slop now.