this post was submitted on 21 Jul 2024
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Against Astroturfing and Social Media Manipulation
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Pointing out, fighting, spreading awareness about State sponsored and Company sponsored astroturfing on Lemmy and elsewhere. This includes social media manipulation, propaganda, and disinformation campaigns, among others.
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Part of the troll factory tactic is to make it a morally grey zone, because they know they have the money and the numbers to materialize it. Indiscriminately doing this is helping them in their effort to lower the information to noise ratio and make their efforts more indistinguishable from "the other side's" turning it into a "well, they would do it too, if they were as successful and had as much money and resources as us" argument.
I'm aware of this tactic. There are a few well documented systems that work very efficiently at splintering groups. The problem with labeling any conversation that falls into the grey area, like it or not, is actually alienating the vast majority of nonpolarized viewpoints. Either you fall in line with faction a or b or you are the enemy of both. Political parties have used this effectively for decades. You beat the majority by splitting them into subfactions. This thread and topic is a spectacular demonstration of the result.
Doesn't matter, if a conversation is likely to influence someone, then that makes it the ideal target for a troll factory. Troll factories also don't just influence one side, they influence any "factions" people might crowd in. The most straightforward solution is eliminating high noise-to-signal ratios, in other words, misinformation and disinformation, and being transparent about it.But that will never be effective against people who just don't care about the noise-to-signal ratio and just care about the information that satisfies their ego. It will never be effective against cults.
There's a reason we need to filter out spam, and there's a reason we need to filter out disinformation and misinformation, it isn't just factions, but yes, it will necessarily devolve conversations into factions because some of them just don't curate the quality of their information.
See but, this isn’t indiscriminate action, I mentioned in another comment that I don’t mean flood shit posts, but to flood with valuable and informative content.
If we cannot stop the pipe from spewing sewage, we have to counter flood with enriched flow to lower the ratio of shit:water.
We will still have a flooding problem, don’t get me wrong, but that is a much larger problem that exists. Republicans have been quoted as stating they just want to muddy waters. We need to flood with water to reduce how muddy they truly are. And certainly not with more mud.
The distinct problem we face is that of busy minds who don’t have the capacity to filter. So they flood with mud to bog down the mind. Hope this makes sense and helps to clear up my intentions/proposed soln.
There are sites that try to do this like ground.news , but the problem I think is that you are misjudging which side has the people really willing to inform themselves and which just accept the information that is convenient for their ego.
I have to disagree with you. Both sides have their fair share of people who are interested in informing themselves, and until we actually have statistics, this is a bias-prone best guess.
Laziness is not inherent to political ideals in any way.
If people informed themselves, there would be no Trumpers.