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.
Same as instance rules, plus:
Those bots have been so successful the past few years that if they shut them all down tomorrow, it wouldn't matter because they managed to radicalize enough idiots to keep it going.
They've actually studied this and found it not to be true. I'll look for the study later, but it said that if you cut off access to Fox News and Facebook, people get less racist and wanting to do harm.
Do they really? Or are they just less emboldened to verbalize their bigotry?
I suspect a surprising percentage of people just follow the crowd. No effort required to formulate any bigotry or predudice or whatever, just copy others and you're part of the gang. If there's nothing to copy they just shrink out of view.
If you stop exciting them they return to a low energy state
If one stops drinking alcohol, one stops being drunk.
I think people in groups acclimatize to the vibe of their surroundings and verbalize things in a nudged way to land well within the group. So if the group is toxic, the nudge will be toxic.
well actually, it actually stops thier momentum. case in point on reddit, when they were actually clean sweeping all the propaganda bot, the site remained extremely quiet for a few days of any astroturfing or "both sides" bs. yea it doesnt stop the violence, they just lose steam really quickly. the Right constantly need something to poke them into action.
Paid for by various organizations in America.
Cambridge Analytica provided proof of concept, the bastards.
Trump is a pedo
RELEASE THE FILES
Don't blame American lunatics on Russians and Chinese. It wasn't the Russians or the Chinese that voted for Trump or shot Charlie Kirk.
No, the Americans just voted for them after being brainwashed by tons of Russian and Chinese propaganda.
Americans are stupid, but the Russians and Chinese propaganda machines are not innocent.
Don't give them all the credit.
We have enough homegrown propaganda on our own.
This sounds a lot like motivated reasoning to me. Frustration and resentment has been simmering in the US long before social media was big enough to be useful in astroturfing campaigns.
Americans need to take responsibility for the state their country is in, and not find excuses or scapegoats to blame.
I mean Laura loomer is clearly a lizard in the least convincing skin suit I've ever seen
Hey, guess who invented Fox News. You think they stopped there as the internet became the new battleground? Why don't we hear about what the GOP bots are doing? China and Russia, though guilty themselves, are generally red herrings in these contexts because the GOP doesn't want the fingers pointed where they belong.
I don't think the GOP isn't trying, but I think Russia in particular is just way ahead of the game where this stuff is concerned. Democrats in no way have a monopoly on just being coked-up boomers bouncing around Washington having no real coherent idea of what successful political strategy looks like and not really having to care. I think most of the successful non-mainstream-media manipulation and funding comes from outside the country, it just happens that what they want to happen lines up with promoting the GOP by coincidence.
Wrong. The GOP has been planning their coup since the 1970s. Fox came out in 1996. They wrote the playbook on dismantling America and have been working on it since before the internet brought Russian bots. Before trump got enriched by Moscow money.
Russian bots are gop bots.
When last night's phone call from the folks turned to Kirk and violence, I made a point to mention that, yes, there were lots of posts for violent 'retribution', but we have no idea how many are just bots trying to stir the pot rather than actual people -- but consoled? them that it was still proper to worry because surely those posts would convince some suggestible people that the bot-post ideas are a widely held and acceptable reaction.
The number of AI generated images reinforcing the apoplectic right’s unchecked hatred of the left is astonishing, along with a flood of pic/text images along the same lines. Just blind hatred all demanding something be done to the left.
I am so glad I abandoned Instagram and friends. I have no idea about this and I would be unhappy to see it in action.
It might be true that there are bad actors - some even from china or russia - that are intentionally stoking tensions in the us, but dismissing that tension as manufactured would be a mistake.
Democracy is supposed to be a pressure valve for political dissent, and when those institutions start failing to address the demands of citizens, they start looking for more and more extreme ways to make their dissatisfaction known. American democracy stopped addressing the grievances of the people long before 2016 came along. Trump himself embodies an antiestablishment resentment that could be seen making itself known all the way back in 2008 and 2012, most vividly (in my mind, at least) during the townhall with Romney in 2011 when the conservative members in the crowd yelled at him that Obama was a terrorist. Both parties have been trying to suppress the populist sentiment in their respective bases for a long time, and 2016 was merely a watershed moment for what was set in motion a long time ago.
Which is why I find myself with mixed feelings in the wake of Kirk's death; catharsis, for seeing a stochastic agitative propagandist being on the receiving end of the violent environment he actively created and advocated for, and fear and frustration, for knowing that his death will do nothing to quell the surge in fascism and likely only embolden many more to do the same.
I have been more active, but I don't know about a "tremendous amount"
what the hell is "online violence"
Framing to attack free speech.
Well it shouldn't be so easy tbh
True that, our society is soft and complacent and that is the cause of most of our problems.
What does being soft and complacent even mean??? Western states do everything they can to propagandize people since birth, so whenever some racist asshole is the only one to use glaringly obvious contradictions -that no one in power will address (because it endagers their position)- people will accept that asshole as a truthsayer.
Perfect example: immigration
Daily beast article spreading dubious info pointing fingers at Russians and Chinese bots, based on what Cox said.
What does "vs disinfo" mean? "Fediverse vapidly slinging disinfo"?