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submitted 3 months ago by GameGod@lemmy.ca to c/main@lemmy.ca

The sole moderator doesn't even follow their own rules: https://lemmy.ca/post/22741340?scrollToComments=true

I'll just say it - it's a Russian propaganda community. Is there any reason this community needs to exist on Lemmy.ca? Is there a rule against blatant astroturfing / propaganda / misinformation? I don't think the 5 rules in the sidebar are going to be enough to stop an army of trolls:

No bigotry - including racism, sexism, ableism, homophobia, transphobia, > or xenophobia. Be respectful. Everyone should feel welcome here. No porn. Use the NSFW tag when needed. No Ads / Spamming. Bot accounts need to be flagged as such in their settings.

Maybe time to get ahead of it?

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[-] streetfestival@lemmy.ca 6 points 3 months ago

I'm not too knowledgeable about the c/geopolitics community because it wasn't my cup of tea and I blocked it early on. But I interact with the mod/user in question on !toronto@lemmy.ca and !leaf_nation@lemmy.ca. I'm pretty confident they're an individual who follows the Toronto Maple Leafs and lives in Toronto and not a bot account or professional propaganda account or anything like that. You might find their politics view objectionable. I can't really speak to that. You can block communities you don't want to see in your feeds

[-] GameGod@lemmy.ca 13 points 3 months ago

You don't have to be a professional to parrot Russian propaganda. How it works is they find a sympathetic ear, and then spoon feed this garbage content with them with the knowledge that someone will post it. Sometimes the content is targeted, other times it's just pushed through these low quality / fake news sites and then gets picked up on social media and spreads. Sometimes the content starts out neutral-ish, then they build up this pro-Russian slant over time, slowly mixing in all this nonsense. No propaganda feed (for any nation) is 100% propaganda - it's going to be 20% real news, 20% opinion, 20% opinions parroting Russian state media, etc. etc. It's similar to the magic mix Facebook gives you in your feed.

Beyond the main issue that this thinly-veiled propaganda community is going to attract the wrong audience and expose the existing/future audience here to utter bullshit, I take specific issue that the end goal is to undermine the security of our fucking country. Russia has been fighting a cyber and information war against us for over a decade and we can't just look away and pretend it's harmless. Between allowing state sanctioned cybercriminals to flourish and attack our hospitals with ransomware, to trying to undermine democracy across the globe, we need to step up our game and put our foot down against this shit because it's going to get a lot worse, and the sooner we nip it in the bud, the better.

[-] GameGod@lemmy.ca 8 points 3 months ago

And I remember when Reddit, Facebook, and Twitter turned a blind eye to blatant astroturfing and widespread manipulation from around 2015-2020, pretending their sites weren't overrun with inauthentic behaviour. The lesson from that is that you need to take disinformation and coordinated manipulation seriously if you want to have a viable community on the internet. Lemmy.ca has to get in front of this stuff. (who am I kidding - Reddit and Twitter are still at least 50% bots.)

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this post was submitted on 08 Jun 2024
120 points (96.2% liked)

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