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?
If you only look at your subscribed communities you’ll see much less of it.
Since Lemmy is an open source platform it is incredibly easy to build automated bots to spam it. I suggest looking for quality user Profiles to follow, and see what communities they posted on to find high quality communities.
Be real careful calling out or reporting a bot/troll. Some weak ass mods around that will ban you for either even though they say to report the mod…
Yep, and i understand that im on a western instance so western politics is to be expected but it was getting too much that
Allpage is overwhelmed with politics to the point that i don’t see posts that interest me anymore. So i just blocked political communities and also communities related to twitter. Now I interact more with the fediverse cause i actually get a chance to see things that i can relate to instead american politics.It’s US election year and this is (primarily) an English language site. Is that really a surprise?
No. But did you notice anyone bringing up Hilary’s emails?
Same with the Gettysburg Address! 😾
You never hear about that one anymore lol.
Someone appreciated my joke, 🙏
No, because this isn’t 8 years ago.
You’d be surprised about the Republican party and their mental retention of useless facts.
Filtering the names of popular political figures is leaving me with much less political news and the stuff that remains I am much more likely to care about than the usual gossip about celebrities, I mean politicians.
Oh dang. How do I do that?
I’m using sync for Android and it’s a feature. I think there are a couple other apps that have the same.
Honestly just filtering out the words “Trump” and “Elon” would get rid of about 95% of it all.
Gotta hand it to the news SEO teams, they know what makes effective clickbait.
If you, a potential voter, are reading something, then people trying to win an election will try to put information that will influence your opinion into those sources you are reading.
Thunder, the app I use on android, has a keyword filter so I don’t see that junk.
Edit: I keep informed via rss. Lemmy is for fun so politics get filtered.
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.
Few memes channels get some and comments are just vile.
If you’re in a meme group you’ve already resigned to waste the time rotting your brain, so, whatever you get is consistent.
First time?
Don’t worry, day after the election they mysteriously vanish as if they were never real at all.
Like when Biden stepped out of the election. The scripts were broken and there was only silence
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.
Do other countries have laws forbidding campaigning before a certain time?
Denmark has yes. I believe its limited to a pretty short period of a month.
In a way people decide on what to vote, depending on what the parties have been active with in between elections. The campaigning mostly is about promoting that and pointing at what others have failed with
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.
I don’t understand why it needs to be this long
Money and ratings. Since money is free speech and the media is a receptical for infinite speech, they can engineer a multi year campaign to keep that money flowing in constantly. And making it contentious means more eyeballs on the story and even more money for the media orgs.
I have blocked all the sublemmys that are doing it
It’s been bad for a bit with the tankies here taking every opportunity to make some variant of “genocide Joe” comments but refusing to discuss any of the choices we had and the result of those choices.
They got super-quiet when Biden dropped out. Vanished.
Now we’re getting what appears to be a new wave.
They had to workshop new prompts
It always takes them a bit of time to pivot talking points. I imagine that whenever a pivot is needed, there’s a bunch of drunk higher up russians having meetings to come up with new ideas, then all those ideas get thrown out there to test them, they measure clicks and responses to figure out what works and once they find something that sticks well enough, the frontline trolls will receive the new talking points and playbooks.
We’ve all see some vile attacks against Walz and especially Harris recently. But unfortunately for Trump and his foreign supporters, drunk macho fascists coming up with ideas to attack the character of a non Caucasian woman, does not produce ideas that resonate well with the democratic left. So they were unable to find something new that had enough zing and they went back to their golden classics of pushing a 3rd party and the “both sides” argument, for now anyhow.
Just because you disagree with it does not make it spam.
If anything your post history looks like a spammer/troll.
Shit like this is why I wish instance blocking dealt with users, too
I haven’t really noticed much, but that’s because I’ve taken to blocking political communities once they start bothering me by putting too many article links in the front page or being generally rageful.
I’d love to but where are you getting regular news (and please without ‘Elon musk might maybe sell stocks in tesla’ “news” and likewise) ?
I don’t follow !politics@lemmy.world, but stuff like !news@lemmy.world and similar have been pretty political.
But on the other hand, it’s not due to a downvoting campaign against non-political stuff or anything. It’s just because users there aren’t actually submitting much non-political news. I mean, I’m not really enthusiastic about ragebait and such, but on the other hand, I can’t exactly yell at someone for submitting something other than what I want to look at. The problem is just that there aren’t enough people out there submitting stuff that I do want to see at the moment.
I mean, the real issue is that users need to do a certain amount of submitting and/or commenting to generate interesting stuff for others to read. The ratio drops as the size of a community increases; if communities are small, there has to be a higher ratio of content creation for the community to be viable.
It doesn’t take a very high ratio if you have thousands of people in a community, but it’s still larger on the Threadiverse, in 2024, than it is on, say, Reddit.
Blocking half this site has made it significantly more pleasant.
I mean it’s in /asklemmy too. I suggested voting for Kamala a few days ago is better than Trump if we want to move closer to universal healthcare and apparently I’m a murderer of 70000 people because of a pragmatic view of voting for her is better than Trump.
It was so quiet and nice a few weeks ago when everyone agreed for a short period Kamala was decent. Now the disinformation campaign has restarted, supporting her is supporting the “neo-liberal/pro-corporate agenda”. So bloody tired of conservative/Russian bots.
Oh, you support a mainstream candidate, huh? What else, do you like eating babies? Why don’t you just admit you’re evil incarnate and vote for my favored candidate instead?
