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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YSK that consciousnessofsheep.co.uk is probably propaganda (ponder.cat)

submitted 1 week ago by [email protected] to c/astroturfing

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It's so artful in its imitation of the form of a lot of genuine climate and economic doomerism that gets published on the net, that it's easy to miss that it tends to always come back around in the end to the same handful of highly dubious conclusions:

The UK trying to move away from fossil fuels is a horrifying blunder which is sure to lead to economic disaster
Specifically, it needs to start buying Russian oil and gas again
Oh by the way, the war in Ukraine is a bad idea

Draw whatever conclusions you like.

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[–] lettruthout 7 points 1 week ago (1 children)

'Never heard of the site before but it sure looks like propaganda...

"Without oil the western economies couldn’t have condensed 150 years of economic growth into just two decades. Indeed, without the exponential growth in oil production such spectacular growth could never occur again."

They say that like it's a bad thing.
https://consciousnessofsheep.co.uk/

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 week ago (1 children)

I wouldn’t care, but I saw it posted in [email protected] apparently as something sincerely intended to inform, and I wanted to say something about it.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 week ago (1 children)

I haven’t really spent much time in the lemmy collapse community. But the reddit one was taken over by Russian propagandists a year or two ago.

A similar overtake to other leftist subs like r/aboringdystopia r/greenandpleseant r/therightcantmeme r/latestagecapitlism . All of which are now pushing Putin type narratives.

Ukraine bad, Don’t vote democracy is bad (this is especially aimed at US voters, alternative is pushing fringe left wing spoiler candidates), and blaming pretty much everything wrong with the world on US imperialism (don’t get me wrong, there is some merit to this, but they hypocritically support Chinese and Russian imperialism instead)

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 week ago (1 children)

There are also a lot of Lemmy communities which are clearly being operated by those people. It's alarming.

Depending on your POV, you might say that they haven't got much traction yet, and they're still mostly one-person communities out on the fringes. But there are more than a few of them. Depending on your POV, you might also say that the type of moderation the LW core team likes to do to world@LW and politics@LW is so clueless, and coincidentally happens to provide a comfortable safe space for propagandists to exist in, that it might be a more subtle version of that corruption. That's a separate conversation, of course.

I don't think moderators, in the modern day Reddit role of gatekeepers of allowed points of view within that community, should exist. The opportunity for this brand of corruption to take hold is one absolutely huge reason why.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 week ago (1 children)

Yep. Though blocking the few outspoken voices, think Linkerbaan and company, and then defederating from Hexbear, Grad and ML removes a lot of that.

This kind of stuff is what inspired me to make this community in the first place (I’m the alt of @[email protected] )

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 week ago

If only the moderators who are so committed to spending time making MBFC bot, and removing posts which call someone a troll or edit the headline for clarity, were doing things like that. Removing unwanted overt toxicity from the community.

On the other hand, that might make the community better, and we can't have that. For some reason.