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.
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.
other countries
Somehow I really doubt we exclude ourselves
We just call it the news when we do it to ourselves.
You whack it with a few memes and poor decisions come out.
… ouch. ~sigh
Yeah, pretty much.
It’s also by design.
The flaws are designed to be exploited by the rich and powerful.
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.
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.
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.
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 :-)
You can block them
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
Yeah, fair enough. It’s a bit weird for me to discuss politics, too. Especially since I’m not from the US and lots of people here are. But our perspectives are so different. I’ve been called a communist. And I’m far from it. A lot of people are ignorant or trolling, too. That has nothing to do with where they come from. And yeah. Lemmy in general is overly political. I completely agree. And I’d rather discuss some computer projects, personal projects and hobbies or whatever. Most of politics is just a shitshow. Especially when I look across the ocean. And that’s none of my business, strictly speaking. We have our issues, too. I’m not okay with excluding capitalism from the arguments, as I think it’s one of the biggest issue with for example why parts of the internet suck. But I think I get it if you say you’re tired of it and resignate.
If you interpreted my last comment that I called you communist ( which I didn’t intend ), I’m sorry that wasnt my intention. However, in my home country we say that best way to finish a meeting or party is to start politics. That’s why I’m allergic to politics because I know that most people even don’t try to argue, they only repeat “their opinions” same one form or another and call themselves names and labels. People have too far opinions to reconcile and I’m fine with this
Yeah. I wasn’t implying that. You didn’t call me anything. I’m just a bit sad that it is the way it is. I think in a democracy it is our job (we as the people / citizens) to shape the world around us. Ideally it’d work that way and that’s what democracy is about (at least in part). It’s super unhealthy for a society that people can’t talk to each other or reconcile. But that’s where things are steering towards?!
Being stubborn and having strong opinions, calling each other names and confining people to labels doesn’t get us anywhere. And it doesn’t get anything solved. I’d not participate in that, either. The sad thing is that this silences the good people. Maybe like you(?) And in the end I’m not okay with that. Idk. Take care… Have a nice day… I think on a personal level your reasoning is perfectly valid.
Tl;dr election year in the US. It’s only going to get more intense until the actual election.
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.
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.
Israel -Garza trolls/posters too
Edit Little bit ironic funny. In a thread about trolls the trolls come out
They can’t stop until kamala walks into the oval office and kicks biden in the nerds and screams, “Isreal better stop now or ill nuke the Vatican.”
Can we please nuke the vatican? Then continue systematically disassembling all other religions?
They are the mods. Your reports go straight to them. That’s how they know to ban you.
You should get banned for that. This isn’t Reddit, go back if you want a hug box.
What the hell are you talking about?
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.
You shouldve been alarmed when his followers claimed “they rather be russians than democrats”
I was.
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.
It never really ends in the US. News people actually watch is so hyper polarized that the past four years felt like an election year, and they just repost it all to social media. Honestly I get wrapped up in it too… and I hate it.
It’s like nothing gets any clicks unless its slurring a party or candidate, virtue signaling or parroting some party line, or something like that.
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.
Keep in mind that the US’s population is comparable to all of Europe and we are bickering over one shared election while also being a bunch of loud jackasses. We don’t even think about the rest of the internet while drowning it out.
Comparable not really. The EU has a population of 450 million compared to 350 million of the US. Europe itself has more than double at 750 million. Also, there are many more countries outside of Europe that have a lot of people that speak English online.
Yeah, it’s been proven America has no impact on the rest of the world at all.
Besides a strong military ally it has indeed not had much positive impact.
Not a jazz fan? Not a rock’n’roll fan? Not a hip-hop fan?
How about transistors? Or the Green Revolution? Or the polio vaccine?
Lol negative impact inexplicably doesn’t count. Our president totally having just no power to reduce or increase negative impacts. yep very intelligent viewpoint here
I have no idea what you’re trying to say.
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.
Every 4 years.
Rather than block lists, just subscribe to the lemmy communities that interest you and don’t subscribe to political/news communities. Then view lemmy through the “subscribed” feed rather than the “all” feed - no political posts - problem solved.
I trawl through All to find new communities though, and a short blocklist makes that much easier.
Doesn’t help. Everything from the meme/joke/fun communities you’d expect people to use to tune out The Horrors™ to discussion about the ActivityPub standards (what little exists that doesn’t conflate it with Just Lemmy or Just Mastodon) devolve to US politics in like two comments. For me at least this entire section of fedi is a US politics-radioactive one I try spending as little time as possible (that includes posting non-politics!)
I find myself having significantly more fun on the microblogging side of the fedi, ruining jokes to ground in like 4 minutes with my oomfs and making followup meta jokes about how jokes only last 4 minutes. People actually use content warnings to hide away The Horrors™ when they want to talk about it, which means filters actually work. (Things like alt text for images also helps with word filters!)
Huh, it’s almost as if politics matters because it affects people’s lives, and so people feel motivated to talk about it. Who knew?? 🤯🤷
Just because you wish to talk about your own country does not mean I want to listen to the politics of a country I am not a citizen/resident of nor have ever set foot in. That’s what content warnings and other functionality allow me to do. Unfortunately, Lemmy.
(Also notice how I specifically single out “US politics” and not “politics” in general. That is a different thing where “politics” is sometimes used to mean “anything I don’t like not from a white cis het from the upper middle class person”. That is not the case here. I am simply tired of hearing about Trump and Biden and Harris and whoever the new VP is or whoever the Republican Main Character of the day is or the Democrat Main Character of the day is)
Just blocked politics & news and my quality of life instantly jumped 200%. I highly recommend it. If something significant happens, you’ll read about it in another community.
Filter out the names of the candidates and a couple of crazy billionaires and you can even keep the news subs.
Lots of blocking to do. Trust me, you won’t miss it. Part of the fun here.
Me too. I had been getting really agitated, and others too, but it became so obvious that it was foreign influence trolls. Blocked politics, but it’s especially concerning because most people aren’t going to block politics.
There seems to be a few people suddenly calling Biden racist too, and trying to say both parties are the same. If it quacks like a lobbyist, it is possibly a lobbyist…
But yeah. This is overall probably due to the election more than anything.
People like me (I’m Aussie) will even up vote some things simply because I can’t imagine how bad it would be for Trump to win again… For the entire world.
It’s US election year and this is (primarily) an English language site. Is that really a surprise?
Even worse for us that live outside the US. Nothing but US politics every time we scroll. Well, that and Linux stuff.
Yeah, but if you use Arch you have to make sure to let everyone know you use Arch, it’s in the Arch EULA, duh.
Well, I do actually use Arch btw
That was a close call, you were almost forced into Archbitration.
What is not flooded with political spam these times? And I am afraid we have not seen nothing yet.
