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?
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).
I’ve had a lot of strawman arguments used against me lol. It’s just the internet, I find
Not feeling that, but I block hexbear and lemmygrad
Aren’t they already defederated from everything and anything in the known universe?
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.
Where are they fighting to stay federated? They don’t seem to give a shit
That’s why they’ve started making alts on .world and .ee
yes, very much. i’ve been telling my partner it may be time to give up on Lemmy.
the ones that kill me are the long-form posts that seem to be making one point then pivot in the middle and get confusing. they’re just muddying the waters but people who don’t read past the first sentence or two upvote so they gain traction.
Gish gallop. It’s a common tactic used by authoritarians with no real arguments.
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.
You got me this time Chat-GPT4o
“Chatgpt, convince me you are not an LLM”
I write long winded replies which can best be described as multi-volume box set paragraphs.
I don’t know what LLM is…did he mean LMM? That’s my innitials!
Please select all squares with a bicycle.
No bicycle detected.
Powered by tesla ai
I appologize for the confusion. I will do my best to reffer to you as “Not LLM” from now on. Does this satisfy your rrequset?
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.
This is what it’s like on .ml, where all the hexbear trolls are still allowed. What’s happening is these trolls are making alts specifically to push propaganda. Their admins even admit it.
Yes, that’s absolutely the point of my post. Big upswing in bad actors.
Read: My echo chamber is letting in the bad thoughts I don’t agree with.
My echo chamber is letting in the bad thoughts I don’t agree with.
Removed by Todd
Its just another inflammatory post to rally everyone in a single direction. Either worry or don’t worry. Your choice.
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
Do you ever sort by hot? Or are you mainly in the default sort?
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.
My sort is hot, I’m often seeing posts you never see I guess.
I’m not American so I face no real threat(as far as I’m aware)
You need to up your awareness friend. There is no corner of the planet not directly affected by the upcoming election in the US. Go ahead and imagine the current state of the world but with the US pulling out of NATO firmly allied to Russia. Sound fun?
Is there any proof to your hypothesise or is this just fear mongering?
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.
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.
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.
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.
I think some communities might benefit from a very strict no-politics rule. Because this right wing trolling is ruining lemmy for me.
Like when all the rightoids show up to a discussion and spam image macros of pigs shitting on their own balls?
Get real, this is a left-centered platform, 98% of the trolls aren’t right wing, not by a country mile.
The Russians are all over hexbear. Read the rare thread about Ukraine over there and it’s literally the same shit the Russian trolls say.
These aren’t leftists, they are right wingers (barely) pretending to be leftists.
Hilarity.
“Right wing” for this community is if someone is a capitalist.
Ya’ll have a super left wing echo chamber that’s freaking out about any dissent.
This sort of shit is exactly why everyone is a political extremist now. You insert yourselves into communities that only agree with you.
In which way Capitalism isn’t right wing?
“no politics” is what the right says when you suggest that maybe gay people are people. What you mean is a “no conservatives” rule.
Sorry but you’re right
There’s a lot of left wing trolling as well, even more so imo.
TIL lemmygrad.ml is right wing.
And dbzer0
Who decides what is/isn’t politics?
That’s political innit
everything is political when the right wing is desperate for culture wars and division.
Seriously. Remember this when it comes time to vote. Their goal with all of this is to emotionally and mentally exhaust you so you give up before its voting time.
Nope, maybe try to find new communities?
Why wouldn’t I try to improve the ones I’m already in?
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.
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.
Yeah, that’s a lot of what I’ve been seeing, bad faith actors sewing dissent.
Sowing*
Are you certain? They could be making clothing with divisive messages.
/Jk
Pretty sure this was child labour, not actors.
Yeah lots of anti-Bidens. Totally Russian trolls.
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/05/15/us/politics/russia-disinformation-election.html
It’s starting, for sure. Assuming it ever really stopped, that is.
“those people opposed to our glorious leader are surely from our external enemies ethnic group!”
Do you even realize how xenophobic you sound?
Was that supposed to go to somebody else?
Yeah lots of anti-Bidens. Totally Russian trolls.
This you?
Calling out foreign election meddling. Yes.
those damn foreigners, always meddling.
can you see why we call you blue maga?
Nope. I can’t see. I want all governments to stay out of the elections of all other countries.
And who is “we,” the tankies? The poseur communists? The KGB? The Xi bitches?
Did I miss one?
Another lemmy.ml troll…
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.
paying “users”
And using LLMs, then eventually getting useful idiots involved as well.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Just look at my comments downvotes. It really is about people being angry at others criticizing biden.
No, it’s because you’re ignorant.
Ignorant of what?
The fact that other countries are absolutely trying to influence the US election by criticizing Biden, especially the Kremlin.
It’s me the Russian bot showing up to badmouth dear leader, I gotta be real with you though, nobodies paying me to post on a fucking random ass lemmy instance.
Yes a Trump victory is better for enemies of the US.
Yes Democrats/Biden are making a lot of dumb moves and doing their damn best to lose.
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)
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.
Meanwhile, our Lord and Savior PugJesus is singlehandedly taking the fight to the trolls.
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.
yes but reddit always sheds users every once and a while
It’s not redditors who are doing this.
Wait… single issue politics is a real, proven, thing. Don’t lump that in with ad hominem attacks. If you’re not going to vote for someone you otherwise would because of a single issue, you’re a single issue voter.
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?
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
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.
Yes, if you consider more than one issue (X, Y, Z) when deciding who or who not to vote for you are a multi issue voter, if you only consider a single issue (X) when deciding who or who not to vote for, you are a single issue voter. It’s not per candidate, it’s per vote.
Hold on… I need to whiteboard this.
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
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.
And an idiot
Yes - I wish Reddit would keep them…
