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?

139 points

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.

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55 points

You can’t fault hostile intelligence

Yeah, I can! 😂

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9 points

We manipulate other countries similarly, so you can fault them but there’s an element of hypocrisy in doing so.

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31 points

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.

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25 points

Ideally, we’d all stop…

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27 points

Yeah, the US has been doing this to other countries for decades. The internet just made it more accessible and easier for the rest of the world to participate en masse.

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19 points

other countries

Somehow I really doubt we exclude ourselves

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11 points
*
Deleted by creator
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7 points

You whack it with a few memes and poor decisions come out.

… ouch. ~sigh

Yeah, pretty much.

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6 points

It’s also by design.

The flaws are designed to be exploited by the rich and powerful.

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125 points
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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.

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28 points

haha I just saw an absolutely terrible post by that very real individual

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20 points

I see that this account has a few topics it posts on. Now, that alone doesn’t mean anything. Lots of lemmy users have their 3, 4 topics they are interested in and nothing more. Maybe they are an enthusiastic green party voter.

But that amount of posts in such a short timespan smells like a bot account.

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17 points

That shitbag also got all my content pulled from /politics where I called him out as a shill, then the mods banned me despite me providing proof of his forum sliding tactics.

Face it, lemmy’s already been taken over by the bots and shills, they’ve infiltrated the mod teams and are now protecting their own. We all saw it happen with reddit and the admins just let it happen here to.

Getting so tired of assholes infiltrating online spaces.

The account isn’t a bot, they are a media management account that uses AI content but is ultimately just a person using tools to undermine free discussion.

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7 points

There is another group of users asking basically the same question over in this thread:

https://lemmy.world/post/18757036

It’s definitely odd at a minimum.

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2 points

Reminds me of the bot ban wave done just about a year ago. Maybe hosts will do the same again, or make account generation have a pending status.

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65 points

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.

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10 points

Yep, I’m the same as you. Didn’t notice a damn thing, and was curious how I’d missed anything. When I saw it was happening through new communities I knew it was the All-feed people seeing this.

I get that the All-feed is useful and fun, but seeing random shit is kinda the “price of entry” no?

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1 point

Unfortunately, it’s not bullet proof solution. I still see multitude comments in technology communities about “it’s capitalism (greed)”. It’s an uphill battle to block it all. You can’t block whole instances like lemmy.world or lemmy.ml :-)

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3 points

You can block them

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1 point
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I think that’s a you problem. If you’re too thin-skinned for the truth, I don’t think there is a good way to engage with people on the internet. Especially technology is a field that’s massively intertwined with money. In our current world, the largest and dominatig companies are about technology and selling ads. That’s just the way it is. So when talking about facts and real-world issues with internet technology, this influence is bound to come up… I mean feel free to have your own opinion. Maybe it’s also a cultural difference in our perspective on the world. I’m also a person who doesn’t shy away from calling them out.

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4 points

Arguing with people complaining that everything is capitalism fault is pointless. Especially with people having definition “not their perfect ideal communism” equals capitalism. It’s just waste of my time. I’m done with politics and I know many communities where politics mean an immediate ban

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50 points

Tl;dr election year in the US. It’s only going to get more intense until the actual election.

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9 points

I think it’s more and more prominent. People base their entire personality based on their political beliefs. Plus they are very active. Probably due to it being crazy around the world right now.

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46 points

On one hand, I hate election years.

On the other hand, as The Economist once had a cartoon pointing out, it could be worse.

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17 points

You may be in luck! Trump promised that if you vote for him he’ll “fix it so good” that you’ll never need to vote again.

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5 points

That alone should be enough for any rational voter to stay away from him. But alas, voters aren’t rational beings.

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3 points
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It’s pure insanity. He should be disqualified for that statement, investigated, and arrested if evidence is found he has an actual plan to eliminate elections. I just saw a post today showing that his followers are wearing shirts that say “Dictator on day one”. They’re actually rooting for this shit.

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