I’m personally trying to stay out of (especially US) politics discussions as much as I can, as I don’t think there’s much to gain there for me anyway while potentially costing a lot of time and energy. I’m not from US, so most of that stuff isn’t anything that is relevant/influenceable for me anyway.

I haven’t actively looked whether that person has been posting content that is violating our instance rules, that is simply not a reasonable task to do without leads pointing out specific cases. Without supporting their statements, unless they’re violating instance rules we’re generally trying to allow people to communicate their thoughts here without applying political bias to rule enforcement, at least on instance admin level. I can’t speak for community moderators, but I’m sure that there are communities with bias in rule enforcement or even rules themselves in both directions. If LW users or users in LW communities are violating LW instance rules, we recommend reporting them with references directly to admins, which will bypass community moderators, so our admin team can review it.

I’m also not directly involved in how the bot is used/discussed, but I did have a look at votes targeting the account in the past and there were several accounts heavily involved in automated or at least not legitimate votes, which on its own is generally also a violation of our ToS and would usually lead to a ban. Votes are therefore not really something that can reasonably considered at face value as peoples opinion either, as they’re skewed by those who abuse the system.

The leading case for this is an account with zero posts or comments, that downvoted more than 8k comments by the bot, 98.5% of all its comments. This is not legitimate voting behavior. This user does have other voting activity that is at least not immediately obviously abusive, but their downvotes on the bot comments are about 65% of their total comment votes since the MBFC bot account was created.

Following that, I see another user that downvoted the bot about 6.5k times, almost 80% of the bot’s comments, which makes up around 40% of their comment votes since the MBFC bot account was created.

Interestingly there are also a few cases where people have massively upvoted the comments, which is the case for 3 out of the 13 accounts that have more than 1k total comment votes for the MBFC bot each.

Out of the currently 101k total votes for the bot, 23% were upvotes, 77% downvotes.
Out of the currently 101k total votes for the bot, 41% were created by those 13 users with more than 1k votes each.
Out of the currently 101k total votes for the bot, 51% were created by 28 users with more than 500 votes each.

I can’t say what a reasonable cutoff might be for gauging vocal minority vs representative user base.

If I exclude the top 13 voters with more than 1k votes each, this leaves 59.5k votes, which is 28% upvotes and 72% downvotes.
If I exclude the top 28 voters with more than 500 votes each, this leaves 49.3k votes which is 31% upvotes and 69% downvotes.

I’ve excluded the bots own automatic votes that Lemmy adds when creating a comment from these calculations.

I don’t know how people typically vote on bots they like, for me I wouldn’t usually vote on automoderator-style bot posts, it’s not like anyone really gains or loses anything from that anyway.

Anyway, this is really just some additional data to think about.

fyi @Blaze@feddit.org @Flatworm7591@lemmy.dbzer0.com

edit: typos/missing letters