Russia has been buying thousands of domains and writing AI generated slop to push it’s interests in the west. So this might be part of that.
this post was submitted on 25 Oct 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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I've banned that domain from piefed.social. One of the things I'm really trying to do with my instance is politically-aware moderation so I will really appreciate any future posts like this.
I have a whole list of opinions about dubious sources and accounts. I also spent some time coding up some improvements to MBFC bot, letting it use Wikipedia's list of reliable sources, which is one that's had enough effort put into it that it's a pretty worthwhile source of bias data, unlike MBFC. As far as I know, Rooki's done nothing with my work so far, but it's still there.
If you want to talk about good ways it might be possible to get the political awfulness out of piefed.social communities, I would love that conversation and the opportunity to help. I was serious about what I said about not completely agreeing that moderation should be the "judge" of what can belong in the community, point of view wise, but I'm sure with some care there's a robust way to combat the misinformation without doing that.
'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/
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.
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)
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.
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] )
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.
But like so many (e.g., motoring) over-taxed activities enjoyed by the baby boomer generation, consuming alcohol has been going out of fashion among Gen-Z.
"my hobby activity of choice is commuting"
You had me at Russia... 😉