• Unyieldingly@lemmy.world
      0·
      2 months ago

      Yep Ukraine has taken out 100,000’s of bot farms, and all world powers have huge bot farms, ran by the Gov or trolls or both.

  • SuddenDownpour@sh.itjust.works
    0·
    2 months ago

    Just said on a Reddit r/worldnews’ thread that the subreddit has been astroturfed for years, as a response to someone wondering how could people in the comments be wishing for more innocent Palestinians be killed, and surprise surprise, I got instabanned. The site is becoming a façade of a fake reality in far more ways than one.

    • LustyArgonianMana@lemmy.worldEnglish
      0·
      2 months ago

      I was permabanned from r/worldnews for saying we should give free meals to kids at schools here instead of wasting money blowing up other country’s kids.

  • FLeX@lemmy.world
    0·
    2 months ago

    I saw it a lot but didn’t know it was the comments too.

    Should be illegal, this website needs to disappear once and for all.

    I hope someone will create an extension to flag them

  • BlanketsWithSmallpox@lemmy.worldEnglish
    0·
    2 months ago

    It’s a good thing Lemmy isn’t popular enough to have bots and propagandists posting here with less moderation than Reddit…

    …Right?

  • Shyfer@ttrpg.network
    0·
    2 months ago

    This is incredible. Like, it was always obvious from a gut feeling or seeing comments reposted in the exact same thread, but this makes it even more obvious.

  • Juice@midwest.social
    0·
    2 months ago

    This is clearly the work of the liberal establishment/Democratic party who have a history of 1. Using bots to influence social media and 2. Blame narratives that run counter to their narrow political program as Russian or Chinese “bots”.

    To be clear, I am not a right winger, I’m a socialist who wants student loans to be forgiven, in fact I’d like to see every part of the system challenged with political struggle and reforms, to the point that a class society is no longer sustainable and a new society of the workers can be fought for and won as humanely as possible. Also, if you consider yourself a progressive liberal who is registered as a democrat, I’m not immediately talking about you specifically here, but the party bosses who will sabotage our movements to stay in power; basically the lesser-evilist “moderates” who are so corrupt that its becoming difficult to tell the difference between them and the republican establishment.

    But on the other hand, both parties are using social media bots, and the most popular method is to make the other party look like 1. They are using bots 2. They are backed by foreign countries who use bots. So this could actually be republicans using bots to make it look like democrats are using bots. This kind of uncertainty is paralysing. What do we do?

    Get organized with other workers, if you’re in a union, get involved. If not, attend local DSA/socialist worker meetings or involve yourself in community work that puts you in touch with like minded individuals in your community, and organize them using democratic methods. We have to create an alternative system that is democratic and highly organized to fight back. Recent social movements have not been hugely successful, but they are getting better, we are learning from past mistakes and becoming harder to manage. Please don’t sit on the sidelines any longer, realize you can’t trust the news media or social media. Talk to friends and family about their experiences and put yourself in contact with local activists who share your values.

  • thorbot@lemmy.world
    0·
    2 months ago

    This happens everywhere there, and if you complain the just say “you’re a bot!” Or “Reddit is for discussion” … place is a shithole

  • UndercoverUlrikHD@programming.dev
    0·
    2 months ago

    We use manual approval for programming.dev accounts where there is a very simple instruction you must follow to be approved. The amount of spam that fails that test makes me concerned about the amount of bots from instances without any barriers for account creation.

    What happens on reddit (in regards to spam) will inevitably finds its way to ActivityPub link aggregators like lemmy.

    • sparr@lemmy.worldEnglish
      0·
      2 months ago

      I am sad that the current generation of federated social media/networks still doesn’t have much, if any, implementation of web of trust functionality. I believe that’s the only solution to bots/AI/etc content in the future. Show me content from people/accounts/profiles I trust, and accounts they trust, etc. When I see spam or scams or other misbehavior, show me the trust chain connecting me to it so I can sever it at the appropriate level instead of having to block individual accounts. (e.g. “sorry mom, you’ve trusted too many political frauds, I’m going to stop trusting people you trust”)

      • jkrtn@lemmy.ml
        0·
        2 months ago

        Yes! Web of trust is the only way. Everything else can be scammed. I am kinda wondering if it could be invites and if severing could be automated for social media. “We just banned a third person who came in on your invitations. Goodbye.”

      • Blaze@reddthat.com
        0·
        2 months ago

        Definitely something that will emerge in the future once we’ll inevitable get bots here too

      • SorteKanin@feddit.dk
        0·
        2 months ago

        I guess the question is how specifically you implement such a system, in this case for software like Lemmy. Should instances have a trust level with each other? Should you set a trust when you subscribe to a community? I’m not sure how you can make a solution that will be simple for users to use (and it needs to be simple for users, we can’t only have tech people on Lemmy).

        • sparr@lemmy.worldEnglish
          0·
          2 months ago

          For the simplest users, my initial idea is just a binary “do you trust them?” for each person (aka “friends”) and non-person (aka “follow”), and maybe one global binary of “do you trust who they trust?” that defaults to yes. anything more complex than that can be optional.

          • SorteKanin@feddit.dk
            0·
            2 months ago

            But how does this work when you follow communities? Do you need to trust every single poster in a community?

            • sparr@lemmy.worldEnglish
              0·
              2 months ago

              You’d see posts in a community/group/etc based on your trust of the community, unless you’ve explicitly de-trusted the poster or you trust someone who de-trusts them (and you haven’t broken that chain).

        • EldritchFeminity@lemmy.blahaj.zone
          0·
          2 months ago

          This concept reminds me of a certain browser extension that marks trans allies and transphobic accounts/websites using a user aggregate with thresholds that mark transphobes as red and trans allies as green.

    • Danterious@lemmy.dbzer0.com
      0·
      2 months ago

      Honestly I already believe that this has happened.

      My reason for thinking this is because of this:

      The spike that happened on October 2023 after the initial spike that happened due to the Reddit protests seems unnatural to me.

      Someone gave the explanation of the release of the mobile clients but even then I wouldn’t think it would lead to a spike equivalent to the initial one since it would mostly just be people using an account they already had instead of creating a new one.

      Like honestly if someone knows what event happened then that made so many new users join I’d appreciate it.