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?
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
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.
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.
It’s also by design.
The flaws are designed to be exploited by the rich and powerful.
On one hand, I hate election years.
On the other hand, as The Economist once had a cartoon pointing out, it could be worse.
I haven’t noticed it but I rarely look at the all communities feed instead of just my subscriptions. I do notice that a lot of users seem to be simply in the tank instead of maintaining healthy skepticism towards politicians. I also keep hearing “foreign disinfo” but that makes me chuckle. Of course it exists but it’s not more potent than the domestic disinfo which is even more plentiful.
I also keep hearing “foreign disinfo” but that makes me chuckle. Of course it exists but it’s not more potent than the domestic disinfo which is even more plentiful.
I’m not sure the distinction is easy to make, or all that meaningful.
I’m not sure the distinction is easy to make, or all that meaningful.
I’m not who you replied to, but I think the implication is that the domestic disinfo is often just the plentiful pool of misinformed or so-called “low information voters” who may be pushing an agenda, but not one that goes beyond their own beliefs, whereas foreign actors are pushing a state agenda.
I mean, sure, but when a considerable number of the low information voters are uncritically spreading memes produced by domestic extremists inspired by narratives devised by state actors and pushed through state media, is it domestic or foreign? Does it even matter?
This is not a hypothetical. This is literally how major disinformation has spread since MH17, through Brexit, the 2016 election, Covid and beyond.
The Russians, the Iranians, the proud boys and uncle Jack in the family WhatsApp are all part of the same hydra of crap.
The Russians, the Iranians, the proud boys and uncle Jack in the family WhatsApp are all part of the same hydra of crap.
I see what you mean, but I disagree. Bot accounts are categorically different in this space. It’s impossible to have a meaningful conversation with a bot. So when I see things like bot activity disguised to look like organic human activity, especially when it aligns with hostile foreign state interests, that’s something that I think is uniquely bad and worth pointing out and combating.
Oh yes, this is generally classified as coordinated inauthentic traffic and moderated away regardless of content.
That is, that was the norm before platforms decided they kind of like fascism if it gets them less regulations and more tax cuts.
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.
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.
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.
You should get banned for that. This isn’t Reddit, go back if you want a hug box.
It’s US election year and this is (primarily) an English language site. Is that really a surprise?
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.
Tl;dr election year in the US. It’s only going to get more intense until the actual election.
