I notice a large number of ragebait-y political communities being spun up by new users with thousands of posts & ai profile header photos. I notice comment sections are more acrimonious, and foreign disinfo talking points are circulating a lot more prolifically than before the US election started ramping up.
Anyone else notice this? Any idea on how to combat it on this platform? Are there any communities built around creating block lists of obvious troll/ai/disinfo accounts & communities?
The most powerful country in the world is a large disinformation piñata. You whack it with a few memes and poor decisions come out.
You can’t fault hostile intelligence for giving it a go, and there are a lot of hostile intelligence services.
You can’t fault hostile intelligence
Yeah, I can! 😂
We manipulate other countries similarly, so you can fault them but there’s an element of hypocrisy in doing so.
It’s only hypocritical if you approve of it’s use that way, which I do not. It would be naive or even stupid to expect those countries not to retaliate, but I don’t like it when anyone interferes in a diplomatic process.
No. You, flicker, are clearly in charge of all the decisions of the US Government when it comes to foreign interference.
Damn! I’ve been found out!
Ideally, we’d all stop…
Yeah, the US has been doing this to other countries for decades. The internet just made it more accessible and easier for the rest of the world to participate en masse.
other countries
Somehow I really doubt we exclude ourselves
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You whack it with a few memes and poor decisions come out.
… ouch. ~sigh
Yeah, pretty much.
It’s also by design.
The flaws are designed to be exploited by the rich and powerful.
https://lemmy.world/u/UniversalMonk
One week old account. 684 Comments. 383 Posts. That’s 152 posts/comments a day, 9 an hour, and most are over a paragraph long. Almost all of them focus controversially on third-party advocacy in the middle of an election year.
Not saying this account is a bot, but a person would certainly have to be spending a whole lot of time on lemmy to be posting this much in one week so it certainly feels spamish.
haha I just saw an absolutely terrible post by that very real individual
I see that this account has a few topics it posts on. Now, that alone doesn’t mean anything. Lots of lemmy users have their 3, 4 topics they are interested in and nothing more. Maybe they are an enthusiastic green party voter.
But that amount of posts in such a short timespan smells like a bot account.
That shitbag also got all my content pulled from /politics where I called him out as a shill, then the mods banned me despite me providing proof of his forum sliding tactics.
Face it, lemmy’s already been taken over by the bots and shills, they’ve infiltrated the mod teams and are now protecting their own. We all saw it happen with reddit and the admins just let it happen here to.
Getting so tired of assholes infiltrating online spaces.
The account isn’t a bot, they are a media management account that uses AI content but is ultimately just a person using tools to undermine free discussion.
There is another group of users asking basically the same question over in this thread:
https://lemmy.world/post/18757036
It’s definitely odd at a minimum.
Reminds me of the bot ban wave done just about a year ago. Maybe hosts will do the same again, or make account generation have a pending status.
I subscribe to communities and only read what I’m interested in. So I didn’t notice anything. But I know lots of people use Lemmy differently and read the “All” feed. That might be an entirely different perspective.
Yep, I’m the same as you. Didn’t notice a damn thing, and was curious how I’d missed anything. When I saw it was happening through new communities I knew it was the All-feed people seeing this.
I get that the All-feed is useful and fun, but seeing random shit is kinda the “price of entry” no?
Unfortunately, it’s not bullet proof solution. I still see multitude comments in technology communities about “it’s capitalism (greed)”. It’s an uphill battle to block it all. You can’t block whole instances like lemmy.world or lemmy.ml :-)
You can block them
I think that’s a you problem. If you’re too thin-skinned for the truth, I don’t think there is a good way to engage with people on the internet. Especially technology is a field that’s massively intertwined with money. In our current world, the largest and dominatig companies are about technology and selling ads. That’s just the way it is. So when talking about facts and real-world issues with internet technology, this influence is bound to come up… I mean feel free to have your own opinion. Maybe it’s also a cultural difference in our perspective on the world. I’m also a person who doesn’t shy away from calling them out.
Arguing with people complaining that everything is capitalism fault is pointless. Especially with people having definition “not their perfect ideal communism” equals capitalism. It’s just waste of my time. I’m done with politics and I know many communities where politics mean an immediate ban
Yeah, fair enough. It’s a bit weird for me to discuss politics, too. Especially since I’m not from the US and lots of people here are. But our perspectives are so different. I’ve been called a communist. And I’m far from it. A lot of people are ignorant or trolling, too. That has nothing to do with where they come from. And yeah. Lemmy in general is overly political. I completely agree. And I’d rather discuss some computer projects, personal projects and hobbies or whatever. Most of politics is just a shitshow. Especially when I look across the ocean. And that’s none of my business, strictly speaking. We have our issues, too. I’m not okay with excluding capitalism from the arguments, as I think it’s one of the biggest issue with for example why parts of the internet suck. But I think I get it if you say you’re tired of it and resignate.
I think the problem is that politics is involved in literally everyone’s lives in every aspect. On the other hand, every other hobby is kind of it’s own niche. I wish people would post more in their own niche hobbies, though. Too many people are content to be lurkers (me included, I need to go back to posting in the league of legends, gaming, and other communities again).
It’d help me if you (meaning everyone here) just pressed the upvote button every now and then. I’m regularly typing long answers here, contribute perspectives or give good advice. And seeing that valued by people is on the decline, lately. I occasionally scroll through my old comments and I regularly ask myself if it’s worth the effort if no-one engages or even shows any appreciation by voting.
Feel free to also write text if you have some time to spare. But I think upvoting comments is an important issue to me, too. And it’d already get us somewhere. And can be done by any lurker.
And I really agree with the “post more in their own niche hobbies”. That’d really add to this place. Immensely. I always complain that I’m here for that. And instead, most people just dump the news from some newspapers.
If you interpreted my last comment that I called you communist ( which I didn’t intend ), I’m sorry that wasnt my intention. However, in my home country we say that best way to finish a meeting or party is to start politics. That’s why I’m allergic to politics because I know that most people even don’t try to argue, they only repeat “their opinions” same one form or another and call themselves names and labels. People have too far opinions to reconcile and I’m fine with this
Yeah. I wasn’t implying that. You didn’t call me anything. I’m just a bit sad that it is the way it is. I think in a democracy it is our job (we as the people / citizens) to shape the world around us. Ideally it’d work that way and that’s what democracy is about (at least in part). It’s super unhealthy for a society that people can’t talk to each other or reconcile. But that’s where things are steering towards?!
Being stubborn and having strong opinions, calling each other names and confining people to labels doesn’t get us anywhere. And it doesn’t get anything solved. I’d not participate in that, either. The sad thing is that this silences the good people. Maybe like you(?) And in the end I’m not okay with that. Idk. Take care… Have a nice day… I think on a personal level your reasoning is perfectly valid.
Tl;dr election year in the US. It’s only going to get more intense until the actual election.
I think it’s more and more prominent. People base their entire personality based on their political beliefs. Plus they are very active. Probably due to it being crazy around the world right now.
On one hand, I hate election years.
On the other hand, as The Economist once had a cartoon pointing out, it could be worse.
You may be in luck! Trump promised that if you vote for him he’ll “fix it so good” that you’ll never need to vote again.
That alone should be enough for any rational voter to stay away from him. But alas, voters aren’t rational beings.
It’s pure insanity. He should be disqualified for that statement, investigated, and arrested if evidence is found he has an actual plan to eliminate elections. I just saw a post today showing that his followers are wearing shirts that say “Dictator on day one”. They’re actually rooting for this shit.
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I was.
It’s all about the longest running election campaign in the world. The US elections. I don’t understand why it needs to be this long 😂. France, the UK, India (over a billion people!) can announce and complete elections quicker than the US.
I would love some more intelligent and nuanced spam filtering but, honestly, I don’t think we’ll get anything soon enough.
It’ll get better in November, but then we’ll get a wave of spam about stolen elections. And then better again in January when they finally finish the election game.
I don’t understand why it needs to be this long
Money and ratings. Since money is free speech and the media is a receptical for infinite speech, they can engineer a multi year campaign to keep that money flowing in constantly. And making it contentious means more eyeballs on the story and even more money for the media orgs.
It never really ends in the US. News people actually watch is so hyper polarized that the past four years felt like an election year, and they just repost it all to social media. Honestly I get wrapped up in it too… and I hate it.
It’s like nothing gets any clicks unless its slurring a party or candidate, virtue signaling or parroting some party line, or something like that.
Do other countries have laws forbidding campaigning before a certain time?
Denmark has yes. I believe its limited to a pretty short period of a month.
In a way people decide on what to vote, depending on what the parties have been active with in between elections. The campaigning mostly is about promoting that and pointing at what others have failed with
Never heard of that. In my country it’s normal not to finish your term in office, so once an election is called, they don’t want to plan them too far out. That takes care of it and you’re not too long in between governments
Outside of the news and actual politics subs, the only political spam I see on the reg is posts like this complaining about political spam.
Few memes channels get some and comments are just vile.
If you’re in a meme group you’ve already resigned to waste the time rotting your brain, so, whatever you get is consistent.
Every 4 years.
Yeah we’re all subject to the mind virus that is US general elections.
I hate the phrase mind virus.
Well, unfortunately it is indeed an infectious agent that hijacks the infected to manufacturer more of itself and cannot metabolize or reproduce without directly utilizing the machinery of a host AND its medium of transmission, metabolism, and reproduction is the mind, so “mind virus” definitively fits the bill.
But so do most memetic constructs.
Of course the point of likening it to a virus is to compare it the involuntary nature of a viral infection, even though must people have a voluntary role to play in accepting ideas. So if you take something into your body with full consent, knowing it will reproduce itself, I guess that’s more mind sex? That sounds a lot less harmful.
not everyone actually KNOWS what they’re imbibing though. There are discrete pipelines of rhetoric that drip-feed poison that oftentimes isn’t even noticeable until it’s too late. Little baby-steps of escalation. Getting roofied is not full consent!
each human being comprises a wide foundation of autonomous sensory and telemetry systems feeding data up into a stack of reactive animal impulses of competing interests which present options to a capstone observer process that has executive influence in deciding which options to embrace and cultivate vs which ones to ignore and atrophy and that capstone, your actual SELF, is a much smaller piece of you than you think it is, and it CAN be overwhelmed by junk info flooding the lower sections.
People. Get. Brainwashed. People absolutely CAN and DO become prisoners within their own bodies as their willpower is overwhelmed and swallowed by propaganda and rhetoric, becoming possessed by an ideology that replaces them and transforms their body into a shambling zombie whose only goal is to SPREAD THE INFECTION. You can see it take hold whenever you’re trying to tell someone something that opposes their worldview, watching their eyes glaze over mid-sentence before they are swept under the thrall of canned responses that they neither actually believe nor even fundamentally understand.
Mostly it happened to our parents and grandparents who drank the tea party’s kool aid and then promptly got swept up into the MAGA cult, or worse, Q-Anon. There might be a shred of the person they used to be in there somewhere, but make no mistake, that person is not in control anymore. That person who loved you as family once has been replaced by a ghoul that will sacrifice you to the false god of its ideology now.
No matter how much high-minded philosophizing we pile on top of ourselves, deep down these bodies are still animals beholden to flawed instincts and senses that can be manipulated, misled by illusions, or even driven to outright hallucination.
TL;DR: YOU ARE NOT IMMUNE TO PROPAGANDA.
(but i’ve upvoted you because ‘brainfucked’ is DEFINITELY a valid alternative way to describe this shit XD)
Would you prefer the term “idea cancer?”
Anything that doesn’t bring up an immediate association with Elon Musk and friends is better. I hear mind virus and I just immediately remember “woke mind virus” and have an almost autonomic reaction.
Keep in mind that American elections are coming up and Americans think the internet is only about them. So we’re not only being dragged into this by disinformation campaigns.
Americans think the internet is only about them
Do we though?
You might not. Many Americans might not. But the internet is annoyingly US-centric and can be frustrating to use as a non-American. A random example: Numerous times I’ve gone to sign up/purchase something and put “Canada” as the country and the “State” and “Zip code” boxes never changed. I have been denied purchases and registration several times because the website was coded to only accept US zip codes even if I change the country.
So many sites just assume everyone is American, speaking American English, and interested in American things.
Yes.
Ok I’m convinced
Good.
Now go and tell your fellow countrymen.
lol I will say the dumber ones do think everything is America. I don’t think this applies to the nerds here on lemmy for the most part though
It definitely applies to most Americans here too. Almost anything that’s exclusively US is posted like nothing else exists. Both thread and comments are written like they aren’t aware the rest of the world exists. It’s VERY prevalent here just like anywhere else online, and it’s infuriating for everyone outside the US.
'MERICAAAAA, nation as big as the Earth
That should be our new national anthem!
Smarter Americans do it too. It’s mostly small things, like saying they are from “Georgia” which is a country, while “Georgia, USA” is the state. Using the “Politics” communities (and subreddits) for USA Politics, while all the other countries just post it in their country community (/subreddit). Talking about “southern people” as if that internationally means southern USA people. “Why is my hospital bill so big???” without mentioning they are from the USA (we can figure that one out easily). I can literally keep going on and on.
Yeah unfortunately it’s not primarily astroturfing… these people do it for free
Keep in mind that the US’s population is comparable to all of Europe and we are bickering over one shared election while also being a bunch of loud jackasses. We don’t even think about the rest of the internet while drowning it out.
Comparable not really. The EU has a population of 450 million compared to 350 million of the US. Europe itself has more than double at 750 million. Also, there are many more countries outside of Europe that have a lot of people that speak English online.
Yeah, it’s been proven America has no impact on the rest of the world at all.
Besides a strong military ally it has indeed not had much positive impact.
Not a jazz fan? Not a rock’n’roll fan? Not a hip-hop fan?
How about transistors? Or the Green Revolution? Or the polio vaccine?
Or the internet we’re using, ironically enough
Lol negative impact inexplicably doesn’t count. Our president totally having just no power to reduce or increase negative impacts. yep very intelligent viewpoint here
I have no idea what you’re trying to say.
The world. Americans think the world is about them. Why do you think aliens always come to America? Why the “world series” of baseball or something features only American clubs? Why they have such an extensive military budget.
I guess when I watch French movies that are set in France I should hate French people for being obsessed with themselves /s
Also all the best baseball players in the world play in the MLB.
Hey now, Canada completes in the World Series, too!
It’s US election year and this is (primarily) an English language site. Is that really a surprise?
No. But did you notice anyone bringing up Hilary’s emails?
No, because this isn’t 8 years ago.
You’d be surprised about the Republican party and their mental retention of useless facts.
Same with the Gettysburg Address! 😾
You never hear about that one anymore lol.
Someone appreciated my joke, 🙏
Haven’t seen that. But I have seen some users who spend every moment of their lives posting to sway opinion on an issue of their choosing. And if I accurately assess them as Russian paid trolls, I get all my comments removed and I get banned. So that’s awesome and fair. Their content stays up, protected by mods. What an awesome feeling.
Israel -Garza trolls/posters too
Edit Little bit ironic funny. In a thread about trolls the trolls come out
They can’t stop until kamala walks into the oval office and kicks biden in the nerds and screams, “Isreal better stop now or ill nuke the Vatican.”
Can we please nuke the vatican? Then continue systematically disassembling all other religions?
cough Linkerbaan cough
This attitude is insane to me. A fucking genocide is happening. Imagine this attitude during WW2 if we were spring the Nazis. “Look at all these Jewish troll posters. So many complaints about this Holocaust thing. Must be Russian agents. No idea why else they would care this much.”
I’ve got “Am I taking crazy pills?” energy up in here lol.
At the time quite a few people doubted the existence of the extermination camps. But when they were liberated and journalists got to visit them the cat was out of the bag.
True, but I’d like to think people would have thought better if people were live streaming it, from both sides of the conflict even.
They are the mods. Your reports go straight to them. That’s how they know to ban you.
You should get banned for that. This isn’t Reddit, go back if you want a hug box.
What the hell are you talking about?
Rather than block lists, just subscribe to the lemmy communities that interest you and don’t subscribe to political/news communities. Then view lemmy through the “subscribed” feed rather than the “all” feed - no political posts - problem solved.
I trawl through All to find new communities though, and a short blocklist makes that much easier.
Doesn’t help. Everything from the meme/joke/fun communities you’d expect people to use to tune out The Horrors™ to discussion about the ActivityPub standards (what little exists that doesn’t conflate it with Just Lemmy or Just Mastodon) devolve to US politics in like two comments. For me at least this entire section of fedi is a US politics-radioactive one I try spending as little time as possible (that includes posting non-politics!)
I find myself having significantly more fun on the microblogging side of the fedi, ruining jokes to ground in like 4 minutes with my oomfs and making followup meta jokes about how jokes only last 4 minutes. People actually use content warnings to hide away The Horrors™ when they want to talk about it, which means filters actually work. (Things like alt text for images also helps with word filters!)
Huh, it’s almost as if politics matters because it affects people’s lives, and so people feel motivated to talk about it. Who knew?? 🤯🤷
Just because you wish to talk about your own country does not mean I want to listen to the politics of a country I am not a citizen/resident of nor have ever set foot in. That’s what content warnings and other functionality allow me to do. Unfortunately, Lemmy.
(Also notice how I specifically single out “US politics” and not “politics” in general. That is a different thing where “politics” is sometimes used to mean “anything I don’t like not from a white cis het from the upper middle class person”. That is not the case here. I am simply tired of hearing about Trump and Biden and Harris and whoever the new VP is or whoever the Republican Main Character of the day is or the Democrat Main Character of the day is)
It’s been bad for a bit with the tankies here taking every opportunity to make some variant of “genocide Joe” comments but refusing to discuss any of the choices we had and the result of those choices.
They got super-quiet when Biden dropped out. Vanished.
Now we’re getting what appears to be a new wave.
It always takes them a bit of time to pivot talking points. I imagine that whenever a pivot is needed, there’s a bunch of drunk higher up russians having meetings to come up with new ideas, then all those ideas get thrown out there to test them, they measure clicks and responses to figure out what works and once they find something that sticks well enough, the frontline trolls will receive the new talking points and playbooks.
We’ve all see some vile attacks against Walz and especially Harris recently. But unfortunately for Trump and his foreign supporters, drunk macho fascists coming up with ideas to attack the character of a non Caucasian woman, does not produce ideas that resonate well with the democratic left. So they were unable to find something new that had enough zing and they went back to their golden classics of pushing a 3rd party and the “both sides” argument, for now anyhow.
They had to workshop new prompts
First time?
Don’t worry, day after the election they mysteriously vanish as if they were never real at all.
Would be crazy if it were all just disinformation campaigns throwing shit at each other for 12 months.
Luckily no one’s stupid enough to fall for all that.
Like when Biden stepped out of the election. The scripts were broken and there was only silence
There seems to be a few people suddenly calling Biden racist too, and trying to say both parties are the same. If it quacks like a lobbyist, it is possibly a lobbyist…
But yeah. This is overall probably due to the election more than anything.
People like me (I’m Aussie) will even up vote some things simply because I can’t imagine how bad it would be for Trump to win again… For the entire world.
Hey, 🇺🇸’n here; I’m really fucking sorry that you worry about these childish political problems in a country you don’t even live in.
We’re still months out from the actual election date, so nothing is certain, but what is certain is that Donald Trump is not capable of changing his behaviour, or even actually listening to anything that goes against his rotten worldview. He is a demented track horse that is frothing and shitting everywhere (with a minority of stubborn racists betting on him) while the other track horse is making it look easy when her opponent makes himself look bad.
Its not an easy call quite yet, but if this progress continues as it is, its a near-certainty that orange man isn’t getting his hands on the launch codes. And by next election, I feel confident that he won’t get another chance.
Something tells me that you’re not at fault…
We have similar extremist dickheads here similar to trump (but Trump helps give them power too).
And yeah… It’s absolutely clear trump won’t change his behavior. That became clear after he had a second judgement filed against him for defamation by E Jean Carroll, and he can likely be sued a 3rd time successfully. He really is dumb as dog ****. Could have spent the rest of his life playing golf lying about his profitability. Instead he chose to offend half of the country, and draw attention to himself and his crimes by bragging
