Thank you. That answers my question. I figured you wanted to remain anonymous, but I liked your answer and I’ll be interested in what you find.

I was trying to word my initial post in a way to prevent you from becoming defensive, perhaps I failed. Though, I do feel quoting yourself is a bit… gauche, no? Especially since you are remaining anonymous.

Are you a single person or a group of people? Do you have any credentials that you’d like to share that might give some context to your research?

Where is the quote in your bio from?

We need to stop pretending this is due to a lack of education or critical thinking. Sure, that’s true for some, but I’m betting the vast majority of these conspiracy theories are spread by people that know that they are lies and don’t care. Evil Russian propaganda bots aren’t a great explanation for the totality of the phenomena. People say outrageous things because it gets them clicks on the internet and hurts the “other team”.

We saw it recently with the lady lying about hatian immigrants eating cats - link. She didn’t care how true it was - only that it hurt the other team. They have it comin’, anyway, is their perspective when they’re saying these things.

I’m not touting apple. Its just a fact.Graphene has you check boxes so you know you’re giving permissions to your car. It informs you what information you’re giving to android auto. And, if you’ve installed apps through alternate sources, you do have to go through developer mode in Android Auto to enable apps from alternative sources. It takes less than 5 mins and you only have to do it once, but if you don’t, you’ll end up thinking android auto is broken in graphene, like the poster I was responding to believed.

I don’t think there is a better solution for graphene - it works fine after minimal setup. I’d gladly do that to preserve my privacy when it matters.

Apple doesn’t give a shit about informing you what it does with your info so it doesn’t do that. I’m not saying its better I’m just being honest. Its quick and dirty.

Android auto also works fine for me. I haven’t used an android phone in years so I can only compair it to apple car play. There are extra configuration steps to make it work but its not hard (just have to read some messages and go through some menus)

Apple car play “just works”.

Ah yea, everyone that has an opinion that isn’t mine is dangerous and deserves to be silenced. I totally agree. I think lemmy.world should refederate, and then defederate a second time, just to make sure they get the message.

There wereultiple cross-posts daily pointing to specific threads posted on hexbear to organize brigading.

Yeah, I do remember that. That’s why I’m not signed up there. They weren’t changing anyone’s minds with their shitstirring and were doing it for their own enjoyment (which is damaging to all communities, even nonpolitical ones, if people avoid your platform due to trolling).

That said, it was a past problem, and posters on lemmy.world are still out there complaining about Hexbear like they’re relevant. I’m speaking about the current situation.

I’m not advocating for them to re-federate with lemmy.world (I have no dog in the race, anyway, being a part of neither instance) but I do remember watching the Hexbear mods/admins shutting down the actual brigading of threads before lemmy.world de-federated. Not sure it was a solvable problem, anyway, Hexbear is rather antagonistic in ways I don’t agree with.

Have you considered you are just observing this:

Hexbear is for communists to talk to communists. They get plenty of the “default” liberal opinions from waves hands around vaguely and are entitled to their own community, no?.

Obviously if you go into Hexbear and just start posting anti-China stuff they’re going to ban you. It’s not like the English-speaking world is bereft of anti-China news articles.

I tried to write the most biased scaremongering paper about microplastics for a college course and I couldn’t find much directly linking human health to microplastics that was peer reviewed.

The main paper in this article, the one claiming its human brain samples are 0.5% plastic, is preprint - not peer reviewed. So, reporting on it like this is unethical tbh.

Truthfully, scientists have been looking for this sort of link in animals, and they can’t find earthshaking evidence of it. Most of the papers I found showed weak evidence of harm to animals. Most of the scarier papers have to do with how these plastics absorb chemical pollution in sea water, fish then eat the particles and are harmed. These papers point out they have trouble separating general harm from pollution from harm from microplastics pollution.

Microplastics don’t seem to go up the food chain either, seems most plastics people eat are introduced through processing it. So, stop eating processed food. Stop wearing polyester while you’re at it, a lot of microplastics come from laundry.

I’m not saying microplastics aren’t bad for human health. It’s just incredibly hard to study and it’s definitely not as bad as lead or asbestos. If it was, scientists would have found that link already.

The worst news I ran across was that there is no human control group for this stuff. Everyone is full of microplastics. Those are the only peer reviewed human studies this article mentions - the sort that are like “Of samples from 20 different people, they were all full of plastics! We need grant money for more study”.

I hope they get that grant money.

While not a perfect solution, this seems very smart. It’s a great mitigation tactic to try to keep user’s privacy intact.

Seems to me there’s still routes to deanonymization:

1. Pull posts that a user has posted or commented in
2. Do an analysis of all actors in these posts. The poster’s voting actor will be over represented (if they act like I assume most users do. I upvote people I reply to etc)
3. if the results aren’t immediately obvious, statistical analysis might reveal your target.

Piefed is smaller than lemmy, right? So if only one targeted posting account is voting somewhat consistently in posts where few piefed users vote/post/view, you got your guy.

Obviously this is way harder than just viewing votes. Not sure who would go to the trouble. But a deanonymization attack is still possible. Perhaps rotate the ids of the voting accounts periodically?