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?
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.
Lately it feels like the bots have found Lemmy
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.
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
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?
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.
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.
Ideally, we’d all stop…
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!
You whack it with a few memes and poor decisions come out.
… ouch. ~sigh
Yeah, pretty much.
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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It’s also by design.
The flaws are designed to be exploited by the rich and powerful.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Lots of blocking to do. Trust me, you won’t miss it. Part of the fun here.
Filter out the names of the candidates and a couple of crazy billionaires and you can even keep the news subs.
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
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.
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.
You must might want to check out !fediverse_vs_disinfo@lemmy.dbzer0.com. I started it recently to help people identify and report disinformation on the platform.
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.
Yeah we’re all subject to the mind virus that is US general elections.
I hate the phrase mind virus.
Well, unfortunately it is indeed an infectious agent that hijacks the infected to manufacturer more of itself and cannot metabolize or reproduce without directly utilizing the machinery of a host AND its medium of transmission, metabolism, and reproduction is the mind, so “mind virus” definitively fits the bill.
But so do most memetic constructs.
Of course the point of likening it to a virus is to compare it the involuntary nature of a viral infection, even though must people have a voluntary role to play in accepting ideas. So if you take something into your body with full consent, knowing it will reproduce itself, I guess that’s more mind sex? That sounds a lot less harmful.
not everyone actually KNOWS what they’re imbibing though. There are discrete pipelines of rhetoric that drip-feed poison that oftentimes isn’t even noticeable until it’s too late. Little baby-steps of escalation. Getting roofied is not full consent!
each human being comprises a wide foundation of autonomous sensory and telemetry systems feeding data up into a stack of reactive animal impulses of competing interests which present options to a capstone observer process that has executive influence in deciding which options to embrace and cultivate vs which ones to ignore and atrophy and that capstone, your actual SELF, is a much smaller piece of you than you think it is, and it CAN be overwhelmed by junk info flooding the lower sections.
People. Get. Brainwashed. People absolutely CAN and DO become prisoners within their own bodies as their willpower is overwhelmed and swallowed by propaganda and rhetoric, becoming possessed by an ideology that replaces them and transforms their body into a shambling zombie whose only goal is to SPREAD THE INFECTION. You can see it take hold whenever you’re trying to tell someone something that opposes their worldview, watching their eyes glaze over mid-sentence before they are swept under the thrall of canned responses that they neither actually believe nor even fundamentally understand.
Mostly it happened to our parents and grandparents who drank the tea party’s kool aid and then promptly got swept up into the MAGA cult, or worse, Q-Anon. There might be a shred of the person they used to be in there somewhere, but make no mistake, that person is not in control anymore. That person who loved you as family once has been replaced by a ghoul that will sacrifice you to the false god of its ideology now.
No matter how much high-minded philosophizing we pile on top of ourselves, deep down these bodies are still animals beholden to flawed instincts and senses that can be manipulated, misled by illusions, or even driven to outright hallucination.
TL;DR: YOU ARE NOT IMMUNE TO PROPAGANDA.
(but i’ve upvoted you because ‘brainfucked’ is DEFINITELY a valid alternative way to describe this shit XD)
Would you prefer the term “idea cancer?”
Anything that doesn’t bring up an immediate association with Elon Musk and friends is better. I hear mind virus and I just immediately remember “woke mind virus” and have an almost autonomic reaction.
I have blocked all the sublemmys that are doing it
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.
Its the american elections. I just ban these communities
Yeah, you have much more important matters to attend to, like copulating with predatorial fish
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.
lol ikr its like it’s an election year for a majority of the users or something cmon i wish we could go back to the days when lemmy did not have political posts back in 2020
