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?
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.
Everyone is being spammed with it. Tis the season
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.
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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.
Lately it feels like the bots have found Lemmy
I haven’t noticed it but I rarely look at the all communities feed instead of just my subscriptions. I do notice that a lot of users seem to be simply in the tank instead of maintaining healthy skepticism towards politicians. I also keep hearing “foreign disinfo” but that makes me chuckle. Of course it exists but it’s not more potent than the domestic disinfo which is even more plentiful.
I also keep hearing “foreign disinfo” but that makes me chuckle. Of course it exists but it’s not more potent than the domestic disinfo which is even more plentiful.
I’m not sure the distinction is easy to make, or all that meaningful.
I’m not sure the distinction is easy to make, or all that meaningful.
I’m not who you replied to, but I think the implication is that the domestic disinfo is often just the plentiful pool of misinformed or so-called “low information voters” who may be pushing an agenda, but not one that goes beyond their own beliefs, whereas foreign actors are pushing a state agenda.
I mean, sure, but when a considerable number of the low information voters are uncritically spreading memes produced by domestic extremists inspired by narratives devised by state actors and pushed through state media, is it domestic or foreign? Does it even matter?
This is not a hypothetical. This is literally how major disinformation has spread since MH17, through Brexit, the 2016 election, Covid and beyond.
The Russians, the Iranians, the proud boys and uncle Jack in the family WhatsApp are all part of the same hydra of crap.
The Russians, the Iranians, the proud boys and uncle Jack in the family WhatsApp are all part of the same hydra of crap.
I see what you mean, but I disagree. Bot accounts are categorically different in this space. It’s impossible to have a meaningful conversation with a bot. So when I see things like bot activity disguised to look like organic human activity, especially when it aligns with hostile foreign state interests, that’s something that I think is uniquely bad and worth pointing out and combating.
Oh yes, this is generally classified as coordinated inauthentic traffic and moderated away regardless of content.
That is, that was the norm before platforms decided they kind of like fascism if it gets them less regulations and more tax cuts.
Hmm that’s a great point, I wasn’t really considering the interrelationships there. I see where you are coming from now.
Except that the foreign actors’ state agenda is domestic chaos for the US.
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
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.
I think the problem is that politics is involved in literally everyone’s lives in every aspect. On the other hand, every other hobby is kind of it’s own niche. I wish people would post more in their own niche hobbies, though. Too many people are content to be lurkers (me included, I need to go back to posting in the league of legends, gaming, and other communities again).
It’d help me if you (meaning everyone here) just pressed the upvote button every now and then. I’m regularly typing long answers here, contribute perspectives or give good advice. And seeing that valued by people is on the decline, lately. I occasionally scroll through my old comments and I regularly ask myself if it’s worth the effort if no-one engages or even shows any appreciation by voting.
Feel free to also write text if you have some time to spare. But I think upvoting comments is an important issue to me, too. And it’d already get us somewhere. And can be done by any lurker.
And I really agree with the “post more in their own niche hobbies”. That’d really add to this place. Immensely. I always complain that I’m here for that. And instead, most people just dump the news from some newspapers.
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.
You can block them
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
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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.
You can’t fault hostile intelligence
Yeah, I can! 😂
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.
No. You, flicker, are clearly in charge of all the decisions of the US Government when it comes to foreign interference.
Damn! I’ve been found out!
Ideally, we’d all stop…
It’s been nothing but politics and memes (often about politics) since the first day I joined. I can only imagine how bad it is without my content filters considering how bad it is even with them.
That’s true of every social media platform, everywhere, before an election. Most social media companies are US companies or frequently visited by americans, but you’ll find the same shit happening on foreign platforms too.
Why? Because it works. A lot of people end up voting based entirely on what seems to be the trend, so if you flood their feeds with enough propaganda, they flip.
And people with extreme views don’t care about that, it just makes them feel like they’re not alone and thousands of other people share their views and reinforces their narrow view of the world. And they feel entitled to be platformed too, because in their eye, everyone’s going crazy and the world is really about to end. Just like a religion. Religious people genuinely think you’re going to hell, no matter how sane your argument because their beliefs are more important than reality, because God is reality to them.
Yes. If you want to actually combat them, the best way is to contact your admins.
Not really, but I am from Europe so I don’t subscribe to communities connected to US news or politics. Can you give some examples?
Communities like https://lemmy.world/c/independentmormonism, https://lemmy.world/c/independentcatholicism, https://lemmy.world/c/thirdpartynews, all created today, and modded by a 9 day old user account with 640 comments and 334 posts.
Lemmy is another form of social media, and bullshit that happens on social media will come here as more people come here. Your life will be much better if you make full use of blocklists and filtering.
Don’t know if you know, but just a heads up for anyone unfamiliar, the proper formatting for linking communities is:
!independentmormonism@lemmy.world
This helps users from other instances browse those communities without leaving their instance and prevents mobile apps from opening the browser. It also supports autofill when typing after the exclamation mark so you can’t go wrong.
Which, let’s face it, is dumb. Other clients should be able to recognize linked Lemmy instances and handle the click transparently.
Instead, now we have links that can’t be shared outside of Lemmy and links that should only be shared outside of Lemmy.
How do you expect for that auto-detection to work? Just a regex on
example.com/c/community? What happens when some other instance software decides to use a different URL format? Or do you just assume Lemmy is the only thing out here?Every Lemmy instance can see which other fediverse instances they’re connected to, I’d be satisfied if it scoped to those instance domains. It’s going to be very rare to have a link to a Lemmy/kbin/whatever instance that is not already being followed by one local user, and when it does happen, the first time any local user follows it, it’s fixed again. That covers the 99% of cases better than having to educate every user every time in every thread they innocently post a normal url instead of knowing how to even copy this special url from.
True, that will at least let you figure out what is a fediverse link and what isn’t. Most implementations I know either use the same URL for both the AP representation of a post and it’s HTML one (differentiated by the Accept header), or have a redirect from the HTML view to the AP representation when an AP type is requested (or, very rarely, the via Link header/<link> html tag), which means you can reuse code used for the “search URL to load community” feature in order to make this possible.
Given the list of fedi instances your instance is aware of is already present in the API, clients already have the tools to do this, I believe.
How do you do that? When i go to the community info page and click share, i get the http …
Just type “!” followed by the name of the sub. Make sure it’s the registered name and not the display name. You can find that on the sidebar as below.
Thanks! I was sure there was a nomenclature, I just forgot what it was. Cheers for the reminder.
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 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)
It is election year in the US, a very polarizing election with two high profile wars, any social media will be weaponized
I really wish there was a mainstream social media site Americans were forbidden from using, or at least a way to automatically block/hide them, and their petty little political turf wars from my feed, no matter how I sort.
Honestly, could be an interesting idea for an instance
I can also confirm that political discourse is becoming less civil / productive. Or at least that’s what the increasing amount of such reports I’m getting, is telling me.
Absolutely. They spam their own subs which limits reporting options. The mods of the popular
subscommunities they spam don’t seem interested in doing anything unless a comment or post is an egregious/explicit/blatant violation of the rules.The smart thing to do would be to block them, but I am not a smart man; I feel obligated to downvote them.
The good news, I guess, is Lemmy is growing to a size where following the Local (or All) feed is becoming a challenge. The bad news is Lemmy is still much too small for niche communities to be viable.
