This isn’t about immediately filtered content, like the disgusting DuffMan George Floyd meme, or Holocaust denial. That’s pretty well kept in check by mod tools. I’m also not talking about cogent or even pointed political discussion.

I’m not even talking about necessarily in this community directly, however in a lot of other spaces I’ve noticed a lot of accounts using divisive language and terms like “The ineffectual left” “single issue voters” “ignorant right wing morons”. Lots of straw man arguments, lots of willful ignorance.

I’m not a centrist, I’m very very very far left however I know well enough not to patently dismiss the talking points of others, outside of course calls to genocide. I know what dog whistles sound like, and I’m hearing a lot of them lately.

Most egregiously I’m seeing very long form post replies that read very much like what is generated from LLMs.

So I guess my question is, how’re we all fairing with what might be the largest Turing test ever?

  • Eyck_of_denesle@lemmy.zip
    0·
    7 个月前

    I see more posts about “have you seen this or that in lemmy recently” or “lemmy is worse than reddit” posts more often than these supposed trolls. Sure they exist but all of the time they are down voted or deleted.

    There is also someone saying in the comments that criticizing biden is a foreign conspiracy. Some of these Americans just look like a reflection of the right but call themselves left. I’m not American so I face no real threat(as far as I’m aware) regardless of who gets elected there. So I just think you can criticize “both sides” people without making your leader look immortal

      • Eyck_of_denesle@lemmy.zip
        0·
        7 个月前

        I’m on default and there’s always posts like this every week. Last week it was about the bear and how supposedly lemmy is more mysogynist than reddit. Before it was about how lemmy is too one sided and all the comments agreeing are zionists ranting that their comments get downvoted so apparently lemmy is filled with reddits ban list.

        I don’t have any problem with this but I left reddit cause I was getting more posts about rants about some other bad posts than the bad post’s themselves. Example stremio addons subreddit. That shit was filled with entitled miserable people angry that free software was being used by new people. I never saw that much toxicity even on any arch linux forums.

        There are some instances like hexbear, lemmy.ml, lemmygrad that I see people using words left may not like. But it’s definitely not as bad as it’s portrayed. Blocking these can help.

        • Dasus@lemmy.world
          0·
          7 个月前

          What are you on about? We live in a global society, of which the US is a pretty influential part and also happen to have a very significant military.

          If Trump wins and does everything he’s been going on about, it’ll definitely influence the rest of the world, however indirectly. And it will directly influence a lot.

          Yes, it will affect Americans the most, but to pretend that it won’t affect the rest of the world is naive.

          • Eyck_of_denesle@lemmy.zip
            0·
            7 个月前

            I think you got lost in the same argument lemmy users get lost in. Go read my first comment again and see how I say I’m not American just to let others know I’m not very biased. I also mention as far as I know along with direct impact.

            My whole point was about being able to criticize biden but guess what we are back to Trump bad discussion which no one is disagreeing with. There’s a lot bigger threats while I live than trump or biden. It’s the reality my friend. That’s not to say that these elections don’t matter. Right wing extremism is growing around the world and it’s important for us to call it out. This however doesn’t need to stop people from criticizing actions of left.

            And I specifically asked about your hypothesis of US pulling out of NATO. As you haven’t provided any sources, I would assume it’s fear mongering. Some of you American left are mirror identical to the right.

  • LemmyBe@lemmy.world
    0·
    7 个月前

    It’s election season, so get used to this. Other countries have learned how to divide us using social media, not to mention the years of experience Fox New and Co. have in doing just that. On top of it, we now have AI generated posts to contend with. It’s not getting better anytime soon…personally, I just ignore any post that sounds like it’s inflammatory (which sadly are almost all political posts, and everything Musk).

    • aodhsishaj@lemmy.worldOP
      0·
      7 个月前

      The kind of trolls I’m talking about start a conversation with you, ask you leading questions and pull into a discussion though. Then BAM dog whistles. It’s insidious.

      I’m well aware of the old adage “Don’t feed the Trolls”

      My larger question is how do we deal with the leverage an LLM gives trolls?

      • Hal-5700X@sh.itjust.works
        0·
        7 个月前

        The kind of trolls I’m talking about start a conversation with you, ask you leading questions and pull into a discussion though. Then BAM dog whistles. It’s insidious.

        If that happens stop talking to them.

        how do we deal with the leverage an LLM gives trolls?

        Once again, stop talking to them. Let the mods do their job.

        EDIT or you can block them. You have the tools to solve the problem. Use them.

          • Scubus@sh.itjust.works
            0·
            7 个月前

            I just add a user note to trolls and then anytime I see them I make sure to let people know not to interact with them

            • awwwyissss@lemm.ee
              0·
              7 个月前

              Same. If we want Lemmy and the Fediverse to succeed we all need to do our part to stop propaganda. They spend money to spread misinformation, but there’s no budget for fighting it… just us.

              • Vanth@reddthat.comEnglish
                0·
                7 个月前

                I’m using Boost on an android. “Tag user” is what they call the feature. It’s my understanding many other Lemmy apps do something similar.

                It looks like this:

      • YeetPics@mander.xyz
        0·
        7 个月前

        They’re fighting to remain federated; they feel the disdain from every sane /c and can (surprisingly) see the writing on the wall this time that soon they’ll have to make sockpuppet accounts if they want to continue to troll.

  • weariedfae@lemmy.world
    0·
    7 个月前

    Yes it has been a stark difference that picked up this month. I was in what used to feel like a chill community and the sheer vitriol of the threads the past week has been really annoying.

  • AFK BRB Chocolate@lemmy.worldEnglish
    0·
    7 个月前

    I’ve noticed a huge influx of anti-Biden posts and comments, to the extent that I honestly think we’re finally getting the reddit treatment. I remember there, when the Russian Internet connection went down, and for like a day all those kinds of posts nearly evaporated. And it seems like those accounts don’t just do the overtly political things, they also engage in other areas, usually with a conservative slant.

    • rustyfish@lemmy.world
      0·
      7 个月前

      I remember there, when the Russian Internet connection went down, and for like a day all those kinds of posts nearly evaporated.

      Oh shit, I remember this one. For a short time Reddit became a loooooooooot friendlier. Not friendly but friendlier. You could have a nice conversation with someone opposing your views and it came to an actual trade of insights. I valued that a lot. No fucking derailment with stupid ass nonsense and childish jibes. (At least for the most part. Reddit is after all Reddit)

      • AFK BRB Chocolate@lemmy.worldEnglish
        0·
        7 个月前

        Yeah, for sure. And before that time I used to wonder how much truth there was in the idea of the Russian troll farms - it seemed a bit like a conspiracy theory, even though it was pretty well documented in the Mueller report. But that day was such a dramatic demonstration. The whole site suddenly shifted so much to the left, and the toxicity dropped so much lower.

    • Eyck_of_denesle@lemmy.zip
      0·
      7 个月前

      Maybe there are people that are outside of America and don’t have direct impact of who wins the election and they don’t have to blindly praise biden. Trump is a piece of shi but acting like criticizing Biden is some kind of a foreign conspiracy is funny.

      • Socsa@sh.itjust.works
        0·
        7 个月前

        Maybe it’s because saw this exact fucking shit swing the election in 2016 and a lot of people have no patience for it left.

      • Dasus@lemmy.world
        0·
        7 个月前

        Criticising him? No.

        Criticising him and going “I’m not gonna vote for genocide Joe”?

        Yes.

        If you were Putin, you’d do everything in your power to see Trump elected. And if you pretend Russian troll factories don’t exist then we know you’re in one.

      • PugJesus@lemmy.worldEnglish
        0·
        7 个月前

        I’m just trying to remind them they aren’t welcome in decent places. I wouldn’t go to .ml or worse, Hexbear or grad, if you paid me.

    • schnurrito@discuss.tchncs.de
      0·
      7 个月前

      We used to think that if we had user-generated content, we would all be immune to governments, corporations and other powerful actors spreading propaganda because we would get our information from each other, not them.

      Turns out: governments, corporations, other powerful actors are perfectly capable of paying “users” to “generate content” and not even disclose this.

      The Internet used to be an exciting development, now it’s just like, yeah it exists, so what.

      • AFK BRB Chocolate@lemmy.worldEnglish
        0·
        7 个月前

        I remember, after being on the internet for a while, when the www standard was being adopted and all the web pages started popping up. It was so cool to see the kinds of content people were using it for. Then we got search engines like altavista, and it honestly seemed magical. It was like this egalitarian utopia, where all this knowledge was available to everyone; it was hard not to feel like it was the start of an amazing new phase for society.

        So it was just soul crushing to me when we first started seeing intentional manipulation and misinformation. Search results that were skewed by paid advertisements or google bombing, propaganda being pushed into discussion forums, and all the fake news… it all represented the end of that amazing new phase. Heartbreaking.

        • JackFrostNCola@lemmy.worldEnglish
          0·
          7 个月前

          Oh man when i was young and go to play and explore with my Neopets, downloading things on limewire & chatting on msn messenger after dialling in to the ‘internet’ was magical.

          I should check on my neopets, it’s been… A while.

        • schnurrito@discuss.tchncs.de
          0·
          7 个月前

          I am too young for that, but I do remember discovering the concept of wikis and finding it amazing that websites could now be written by their audience.

          A fairly dead concept by now, nowadays the entire rest of the Internet is more interesting than wikis.

      • awwwyissss@lemm.ee
        0·
        7 个月前

        paying “users”

        And using LLMs, then eventually getting useful idiots involved as well.

    • fishos@lemmy.worldEnglish
      0·
      6 个月前

      Nope, not a bot and anti-Biden registered Dem. You guys always want to Strawman anti-Biden comments as either “angry conservatives” or “Russian-psyops”. You don’t actually address the concerns either, just brush them off as trolls. Discourse on Lemmy is a echo-chambered joke already. It doesn’t need trolls to ruin it, you’ve done plenty well yourselves.

  • Omgboom@lemmy.zip
    0·
    7 个月前

    Are they coming from a specific instance? I’ve blocked a couple and my lemmy experience drastically improved

    • forensic_potato@lemmy.world
      0·
      7 个月前

      While I do absolutely agree that single issue politics is a real thing like you showed, literally the only reply to your comment was only “if you are a single issue voter, you’re an idiot too”.

      So I also think OP has a point here and we’re talking more about the people who use the term as an ad hominem attack, which I certainly have seen plenty of. And now Lemmy has provided us with yet another example of people taking something legitimate and turning it into a weakness/attackable offence. Like some trolls and racist people on the right now talk about DEI in negative terms

      • 𝕽𝖚𝖆𝖎𝖉𝖍𝖗𝖎𝖌𝖍@midwest.social
        0·
        7 个月前

        Fair points. I’m guilty of just saying “single issue voters,” without elaborating on every comment. That could easily be seen as an indirect ad-hominem attack. Maybe I should make a copy-pasta response for whenever I see someone arguing for single-issue decision making.

        That said, there are justifiable single-issue decisions. If Trump was spouting rhetoric about shutting down all support of Israel, yeah. I can stand behind folks “switching sides” over this. Free Choice, ditto. 2A I have a harder time with, but that’s because there are usually so many other issues that you’d think are more important. Not my decision, but I have less sympathy for people who think being able to own a gun is more important than the ability to unionize.

        Anyhoo, like I said: fair points.

    • WalrusDragonOnABike [they/them]@lemmy.today
      0·
      7 个月前

      If you’re not going to vote for someone you otherwise would because of a single issue, you’re a single issue voter.

      I thought it was you decided who to vote on based on a single issue. If you can can about multiple issues, and any one of them is a deal breaker, then wouldn’t you be a multi-issue voter?

      • 𝕽𝖚𝖆𝖎𝖉𝖍𝖗𝖎𝖌𝖍@midwest.social
        0·
        7 个月前

        I thought that’s what I wrote, but if it didn’t come across right, I apologize.

        Single issue voting means how you vote is determined by a single issue. That includes not voting at all because of a single issue. What I meant to say above is that if you would vote for X, but choose to not vote at all because of one issue, you’re a single issue voter. A single issue is deciding your vote.

        As Rush once sang:

        If you choose not to decide You still have made a choice

        • WalrusDragonOnABike [they/them]@lemmy.today
          0·
          7 个月前

          But if you would have also not voted because of issue Y or Z are also dealbreakers, then you’d be a multi-issue voter. If candidate A believes Y and Z, but not X, candidate B believed in X and Y, but not Z, and candidate C that believes in X and Z, but not Y, so you just didn’t vote, it would be clear its 3 different issues that you care about, but for each candidate, it would be a single issue why you aren’t voting for them. Would that just mean you are a single-issue voter for 3 different issues?

          But if candidate A believes in Y and Z, candidate B believes in Z, and candidate C doesn’t believe in any of them in a particular election, in that case X alone would mean not voting for any of them.

  • mechoman444@lemmy.world
    0·
    7 个月前

    I have a comment on my profile where I express some observations about the cyber truck that weren’t expressly negative and it was down voted to hell.

    Maybe not so many trolls, but there’s a lot of pretentiousness.

    • AFK BRB Chocolate@lemmy.worldEnglish
      0·
      7 个月前

      Just like with Reddit, there are a lot of people who use the downvote button if they just disagree, which isn’t really the intent. So you’re likely to get downvotes for any unpopular subjective opinion.

      • XTL@sopuli.xyz
        0·
        7 个月前

        But if a post gets tons of downvotes, it’s not necessarily or even often because people don’t like the opinion. It’s usually because it was pure opinion stated as a fact or in hostile language or in unreadable writing or the user was otherwise behaving like an asshole.

      • mechoman444@lemmy.world
        0·
        7 个月前

        Yeah I generally agree with that.

        I find that people really put a lot of stock into how much they like or dislike something subjectively rather than looking at it from an objective perspective.

  • snownyte@kbin.social
    0·
    7 个月前

    I always suspect a lot of them are coming from Reddit to take their daily dump on something to discourage others from using. All in hopes that we come back to Reddit so that they can gaslight, cry to mods and have us banned again just for their own amusement.

    Yeah they say that the internet in general can produce these kinds of people from all corners, but you do notice by behavior. If it isn’t Reddit, it’s got to be Twitter. One of the two, they’re the most rabid of the bunch that would resort to these kind of things because they don’t lead any productive lives.

    • Bizarroland@kbin.social
      0·
      7 个月前

      Don’t forget, there is a large and worldwide vested interest in maintaining online divisiveness.

      The internet has become our global hearth. The grand majority of humanity participate in the internet to communicate with each other for conversation, connectedness, and social expression.

      This is very bad for authoritarian regimes, whether they are currently in power or attempting to enter into power or attempting to expand their power.

      Should someone do something that is considered “bad”, information about that will spread around the world as fast as a lie ever could.

      To prevent that from hampering their schemes, the smart thing to do would be to poison the source. If you hate everyone on the internet because you have been effectively compromised by psychological poison, then you will not trust the people on the internet that you communicate with when they tell you something bad has happened.

      Therefore, the mote of power you could add to collective action is rendered ineffective.

      And, the interesting thing is they don’t have to fool everybody. They only have to fool enough of us that our own internal division prevents effective action.

      I never really believed in a devil growing up, but if I did believe in a devil now, I would definitely say that this is one of his activities.

  • Uriel238 [all pronouns]@lemmy.blahaj.zoneEnglish
    0·
    7 个月前

    I’m seeing very long form post replies that read very much like what is generated from LLMs.

    Oh goodness, as one who has a bad habit of putting responses into essay form, I hope this doesn’t refer to me. I’m not an LLM. Honest!

    Okay, I’m pretty sure I’m human. It’s a damn convincing hallucination.

  • andyburke@fedia.io
    0·
    7 个月前

    The growing intensity of straw manning over the past decade has hurt us all so much.

    Don’t try to characterize what “they” would do, then get mad at your hypothetical. We need to talk to each other instead of about each other.