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Russian and Chinese Bots Fueling Online ‘Violence’ After Charlie Kirk Shooting
(www.thedailybeast.com)
this post was submitted on 12 Sep 2025
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Fediverse vs Disinformation
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Pointing out, debunking, and spreading awareness about state- and company-sponsored astroturfing on Lemmy and elsewhere. This includes social media manipulation, propaganda, and disinformation campaigns, among others.
Propaganda and disinformation are a big problem on the internet, and the Fediverse is no exception.
What's the difference between misinformation and disinformation? The inadvertent spread of false information is misinformation. Disinformation is the intentional spread of falsehoods.
By equipping yourself with knowledge of current disinformation campaigns by state actors, corporations and their cheerleaders, you will be better able to identify, report and (hopefully) remove content matching known disinformation campaigns.
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I DMed you an example of one of the accounts posting constantly about US politics, and then one day using non-US currency punctuation in their numbers. That in itself isn't all that weird, obviously, but then someone asked them the fairly obvious question of, wait, hang on, where are you from? If you're not from the US (which looking at your numbers you clearly are not), then why do you post constantly about US politics? And, of course, the particular take they had on politics was exactly the same bizarre "all anti-Democrats all the time" opinion set that a lot of these accounts tend to have.
Anyway, when asked about the punctuation, they professed total confusion about the question, made a weird comment about symbols on their calculator, accused people of being super weird for thinking anything was strange about the non-American style they used for money, got hostile, and refused to engage anymore. Basically their answer was 100% bizarre. That part of it is a pretty strong indication that they're a foreign influence operation, although of course I have no idea whether that means "Russian," and it's impossible to really be sure.
They've long since been banned for other sins, but that was the one that really stuck out to me as actual evidence. Most of the time, it's impossible to tell the difference between an influence operation and just someone with a particular set of genuine opinions. They're only really obvious when they fuck up like that or something, which doesn't happen all that often.
There you go, no squirming required.
Whether that poster is American or not, they're quite obviously not a bot. But accusing people who are critical of America's bipartisan support for genocide of just being a foreigner is a little too mask-off.
I had a feeling you would wildly misconstrue lol
I was and still am very welcoming of people who are critical of America's bipartisan support for genocide. I'm one of them. People who wanted to make the genocide ten times worse (and have now succeeded), by letting someone into power who wants to turn what was already a catastrophe into something much, much darker, probably the end of Gaza and maybe the end of the West Bank depending, I was opposed to.
People who were willing to sacrifice Gaza by letting Trump come into office, for whatever reasons of their own, and disguise it behind a tissue-thin veneer of care for Palestinians and accuse other people of some kind of wild weirdness any time someone calls them out on it, I was definitely opposed to. Also, not to mention sacrificing progress on the climate, safety for anyone inside the US who's not a citizen, free elections, all kinds of things which are now in horrible danger.
Anyway, this account clearly wasn't American and was still agitating tirelessly for a particular outcome in American politics which was guaranteed to make things much, much, much worse for Palestinians. If you want to say that they're not literally a bot, and I haven't proven that they're Russian, then sure. Fair. IDK why you would immediately react though by making excuses for this user or pretending that my complaint was something absolutely wholly different from what my complaint was, if you cared about Palestinians.
Its not misconstruing to point out you original claim, Russian bots, isn't what you are trying to prove, foreign-funded pro-republican posters.
But the notion that the poster is pro-republican is the core issue here.
The purpose of screaming about ghoulish shit the dems do isn't to pretend the republicans won't do the same shit, its to pressure the dems to stop doing that shit so they have a shot in hell at winning. By the end of October, dem insiders were saying the protesters were electorally irrelevant and the kids would forget and go home and vote dem by November and people like you were demanding we pledge to vote dem unconditionally instead of helping pressure the dems to do the only thing that would have allowed them to win.
Nothing you or I can say makes genocide, means testing, and rolling over for republicans/adopting their framing and policies popular among potential dem voters.
Every time you say "well republicans also do x/y/z", you help the DNC maintain the delusion they can win on dogshit policy that only their donors like.
So then you sort of implied that OBVIOUSLY I hadn't seen any Russian bots and was just squirming.
So then I said, well, here's a poster who is pretty clearly a foreign influence operation of some kind, in my opinion, but you can draw your own conclusions.
And then you said that OBVIOUSLY I'm just against anyone who is critical of America's bipartisan support for genocide, and the whole thing about the calculator and the actual point of my post was just a distraction I guess.
When I addressed that you moved to saying OBVIOUSLY the purpose of this non American person "screaming about the ghoulish shit the dems do" is just to help the Democrats win the election by changing their messaging, because the DNC reads Lemmy I guess? And you know that that was this person's motivation?
There is a pretty good video which talks about this argumentation strategy. It's never just "Hey show me an example of a Russian bot" "Here's an example, it doesn't completely fit what you asked for but it's what I've got" "Yeah that doesn't exactly fit, I thought you said Russian bots" "Tru dat" (fin). It always has to morph into some new argument in every message, and it always has to be part of a prepackaged talking point ("I'm just trying to help the Democrats" "Oh I guess you think ANYONE who's anti-genocide is a Russian bot" are both things I've seen a bunch of times before. The first one doesn't even apply here, since I think ostensibly we were talking about why this other person was airing these particular views, which you would have no idea about why they would say it, or what the "purpose" was. Anyway, and so on.)
I asked for a Russian bot. When what you gave me wasn't a bot and undetermined whether Russian, I didn't say "thats not a bot, you're wrong", I accepted what you actually meant, 'malicious foreigners, presumably paid, to post arguments and news that supports republicans by showing the dems actions and words' and responded accordingly.
and specifically and explicitly said
blaming literally everything happening anywhere in the world on Democrats and also never shutting up about it and refusing to engage with the objective fact that the Republicans would be catastrophically worse in literally every way
claimed I accuse anyone who opposes genocide of being a bot even though a quick search for 'I don't at all think' or 'just someone with a particular set of genuine opinions' will show me saying literally the exact opposite of that, and emphasizing the reasons why I thought this particular person was an influence operation which had not a lot to do with their opinions except in passing
Fixed some parts for you. I hope there are still some Gazans alive by the time your grand strategy to fix American Israel policy comes back for the next round in the next election. I think it is more likely than not that they'll all be dead. Good job, Patrick, we saved Palestine.
The people to your left accept republicans are worse, that is why we are trying to make the only alternative stop doing the things that put republicans in power. You refuse to engage with the fact that "this one election is too import, we have to shut up and pretend this electorally moronic strategy of being 99% republicans can win." is how we keep getting republicans.
The only way we could have stopped the genocide in Gaza was to stop the dems from bombing them while telling their own base to eat shit, beating the politically activated college students they depend on for a ground game, and maintaining and expanding ICE so they wouldn't lose.
https://quokk.au/comment/877314