What Are Young Men Seeing About the Epstein Files on Reddit?
While most political information on Reddit is “apolitical,” Epstein content seems to be more directly aimed against Republicans than other political news
The revelations surrounding the Epstein files have spilled outside the realm of normal “political news” and into the broader public discourse in a way that other recent stories have not. The seemingly constant trickle of revelations stemming from these files – which have already resulted in arrests, the downfall of companies, and the end of careers – has captured public attention to an unusual degree.
One major source of information for young men is Reddit. Recent Pew estimates suggest about 26 percent of Americans use Reddit at least occasionally – more than Twitter/X, Snapchat, or Threads. At its core, Reddit is an aggregator of information from around the internet, where users “upvote” or “downvote” content to determine their prominence. The site is organized by subreddit: user-maintained communities dedicated to specific topics (such as “news,” “vegan recipes,” or drumming on a cat like its a pair of bongos). As of October 2025, about 37 percent of men 18-29 said they had visited Reddit recently (though, unlike most other platforms, you do not need an account to browse).
Reddit’s user base is not politically conservative. Among young male users, Reddit is the only major social media platform where more users identify as politically liberal rather than conservative. The ideological imbalance on Reddit is slightly larger than that on Twitter/X, just in the opposite direction.
In a recent Young Men Research Project survey that included a sample of about 1,000 men aged 18-29, Reddit users were asked which communities they browsed or subscribed to. Respondents could supply as many subreddits as they wanted. In total, they supplied about 450 unique subreddits, spanning gaming, humor, politics, pop culture, and more. The repeats/multiple mentions generally follow the distribution of how popular these subreddits are in practice. Since that survey, YMRP has tracked activity on these subreddits to stay informed on key topics and conversations that young men are following on Reddit.
As the Epstein scandal has increasingly unfolded in the form of viral videos, memes, and other types of content that can quickly focus attention on specific people named within the files, Reddit is a natural platform to study to understand what young men are seeing on the subject.
First, some important context: Politics is not the typical use case for Reddit.
The following chart breaks down the subscriber counts of the fifty most frequently mentioned subreddits young men said they subscribed to in YMRP’s most recent survey. Two of the top five consist almost exclusively of memes and short video clips (r/natureisfuckinglit and r/mildlyinfuriating); one spotlights candid or humorous answers to obvious questions (r/nostupidquestions); one focuses on pop culture news (r/fauxmoi), and only one is explicitly political (r/politics - by far the most-subscribed political subreddit). Communities like r/politicaldiscussion rank well below other communities like r/ufc and r/bodyweightfitness. Most of the most popular subreddits focus on memes, humor, and pop culture.
Note: This chart deliberately excludes some subreddits, specifically r/Askreddit, that Reddit users are subscribed to by default as soon as they make an account. As such this subreddit’s 45 million subscribers obscure the rest of the data presented here
Similarly, the following chart breaks out the distribution of “upvotes” given out across these different types of subreddits over the past couple of months. In a typical week, a majority or near-majority of content that young men are seeing on Reddit comes from subreddits that might typically be labeled as “pop culture.” Per above, the most popular of these is the subreddit r/fauxmoi, which describes itself as “The cultural zeitgeist archivists.” Despite having 4-5 million subscribers, its “visitor” or “currently reading” count regularly surpasses 10 million (per metrics Reddit provides on the front page by default), with 50,000-100,000 people on the Subreddit at any given time.
However, in many cases, this type of categorization provides an incomplete view of what young men are taking away from Reddit. For example, looking at the front page of the r/fauxmoi subreddit, it is clear that the average browser will take away meaningful political information. These were the titles of several posts were on the subreddit’s front page on February 24, 2026:
Mark Ruffalo: “Tax the rich... They can handle it, trust me.”
Flavor Flav offers to throw US women’s hockey team a gold medal party
Former Jimmy Kimmel writer: For late night comedy writers, Trump is our best and worst audience. He’s our best audience because unlike most Americans, he watches late night TV. He’s our worst audience because his inexplicably bruised skin is very thin.
California Governor Gavin Newsom: No doubt that the Democratic party needs to be, dare I say more culturally normal. I believe that. Less prone to spending disproportionate amount of time on.....pronouns, identity politics. More focus on table top issues, things that really matter.
Donald Trump: I don’t know how long I’ll be around. I got a lot of people gunning for me, don’t I?
American Olympian Alysa Liu: I think it is really important also to notice the faults in our own government. Things are a little rough. There’s so many protests that are going on and I’ve attended. Coming from a family of immigrants, I think immigrants deserve rights
These were interspersed with posts concerning the current state of the quality of the Reese’s Pieces brand, Connor Storrie’s cover photos for VMAN, and others.
This contextualization is meant to serve an important reminder of an oft-repeated maxim of how young people consume news: “politics via entertainment.” These statements from athletes, musicians, writers, and actors typically enjoy a higher profile in young mens’ day to day information diets than content they would likely consider to be explicitly political.
Additionally, note that little of this content consists purely of text. The most successful type of content on subreddits like these is in video or image format. Even the image of Flavor Flav’s content is pretty anodyne, and the key pieces of information are the names “Flavor Flav” and “the US women’s hockey team” – the title of the post (i.e., the gist of the post) is the content. When young people are reading political news (if they are reading it), they are most likely reading an image of text, not text – a subtle distinction that nonetheless has implications for how content like this travels.
The Epstein content has only partially broken this pattern. The overwhelming “origin point” on Reddit for Epstein content – i.e., where news is first shared, prior to being cross-posted to other communities – includes pop culture subreddits like r/fauxmoi and r/publicreakout. (There is also now, of course, a dedicated r/epstein as well). In the following table, we show the most popular Epstein content on young men subreddits: six of the fifteen were originally posted on r/fauxmoi and then cross-posted elsewhere. In other words, even when these stories reach more explicitly political subreddits, they are likely gathering most of their attention (and upvotes) in pop culture and comedy subreddits first.
But Epstein content differs meaningfully from other political news in that it is not just political – it is partisan. The following table breaks down the fifteen biggest stories and their cross-posting counts across major subreddits that young men read. The top few posts all mention the names of Democratic legislators – Ted Lieu, Pramila Jayapal, and Jasmine Crockett – in each case, giving a statement or taking action against the Trump administration concerning the Epstein files. Elsewhere in the top fifteen posts, Donald Trump, Zohran Mamdani, and Elon Musk are mentioned. More akin to other political news stories, other top stories on the subject include musicians and athletes.
In total, the top posts on young men’s most visited subreddits have earned about a million net upvotes. (For context, any non-NSFW post earning over 3,000-4,000 net upvotes is very likely to reach Reddit’s front page, visible to anyone who visits.) Epstein content has occupied the generic front page of Reddit for the past several weeks, even for users without an account.
Notably, none of the top fifteen posts on young men’s subreddits links to a text-based news story, though a recent BBC story concerning Elon and Kimbal Musk was within the top twenty.
There is virtually no right-wing counter-messaging on the Epstein files that reaches the top of Reddit or any other major young men’s subreddits.
Some stories – such as Epstein’s alleged association with Bill Gates – perform slightly better on more conservative subreddits, but that same post also made the front of the more or less politically neutral r/news subreddit. The only major story originating on r/Conservative that crossed over to other popular subreddits concerned a previous FBI statement that Jeffrey Epstein was not in charge of a sex trafficking ring. That post has since been taken down, and the “original” post of this statement now sits empty on Reddit above a waterfall of vitriol in the comments section. Far lower in the Reddit rankings, below 800 total upvotes, is a post concerning Epstein’s alleged associations with various Hollywood figures shared across two major young men’s subreddits. Beyond that, there is very little content on Reddit putting a “pro-right wing slant” on the Epstein news that breaks through to the top of any major subreddits.
But just because these subreddits – and smaller, more niche conservative subreddits – aren’t generating active “counter-messaging” doesn’t mean they’re failing to protect those in power from exposure. Just because these communities aren’t discussing the Epstein files doesn’t mean they’re irrelevant to the discourse around them. These are the places a significant share of young men go to as a trusted source for news. Subreddits that serve as communities for popular creators, such as the r/mauler subreddit and the r/geeksgamerscommunity fan subreddit, can simply continue to focus on what their leading creators prefer to focus on and downweight a given topic by omission. Plenty of creators with an ideological preference know that simply ignoring a subject is a superior strategy to attempting “refutation” in many cases.
But the Epstein files appear to differ from past political stories shared on Reddit in that the major stories primarily feature Democrats attacking Republicans. Discussions of subjects such as the Israel-Palestine conflict are notable for the criticism Redditors have across the partisan spectrum. This is particularly notable because, like any major social media platform with a lot of young people in their user base, this content is likely viewed by more people who otherwise do not follow politics or have a great deal of information about the current state of politics. Only about 41 percent of Redditors in YMRP’s most recent survey said they follow political news “most of the time.”
As this subject continues to unfold, it will likely maintain traction across Reddit; notably, in the places where people are not actively going to have their partisan views repeated back to them. Few young people use sites like Reddit explicitly for politics. The success of political content on this platform, and the shape it takes, is illustrative for how to speak with and persuade young people in the modern era.