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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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 :-)
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.
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
Tl;dr election year in the US. It’s only going to get more intense until the actual election.
On one hand, I hate election years.
On the other hand, as The Economist once had a cartoon pointing out, it could be worse.
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.
That alone should be enough for any rational voter to stay away from him. But alas, voters aren’t rational beings.
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.
