Technology

Good thing I switched to .dbzer0.

Good evidence of astroturfing on Reddit. That Reddit took action and banned the Palantir agents only provides evidence that exposure of the op is the problem. Not evidence that Reddit acts in good faith.

A good question to ask, is what would happen if Lemmy was the victim of astroturfing. It's decentralized for starters and groups might not even reside in the same place on the fediverse. Also I expect Reddit has monitoring, analytics and tools that could flag behaviour rather than somebody having to go through logs trying to find patterns.

I think Lemmy and other federated platforms have escaped having to deal with these issues simply because someone attempting to astroturf will do it on the biggest platform. So Lemmy escapes not by any technical or administrative virtue but by being smallfry.

You guys can’t think there are seriously paid bots on lemmy. There are like 10,000 users. It’s basically a niche message board. Reddit is a valuable target because it has millions of users. Facebook, instagram, Twitter. These places are being astroturfed. But lemmy? I honestly don’t believe it. It doesn’t even have a core of users in any particular country. The small user base is spread all over the world. It just isn’t a target of these campaigns.

People are complicated. Everyone always points to “all that anti Kamala talk ended right after the election!” Yeah, maybe a lot of the pro-Palestinian anti Kamala people saying they wouldn’t vote for her stopped speaking so publicly because the reality of the other option sunk in. That doesn’t mean those people are paid trolls or bots. It means their argument got much more difficult when trump started plotting out his Gaza hotel. Those feelings are still legitimate. The feeling of not being able to sign your name to the lesser of two evils when that “lesser” is still funding and arming the genocidal force. People couldn’t swallow that on a personal level. But as soon as trump was elected, because it was one of two options, for the sake of not being angrily brigades, people stopped talking about it.

It’s a much more nuanced issue than bots on lemmy.

Snakes on a Plane and Bernie have proven that what you see online is complete bullshit.

Biden got the boot because he was a no-hoper and his party must have been aware of his cancer. Kamala stood ZERO chance.

It sucks to have to admit that Trump and his fascists are popular. Very popular.

The wholesale takeover of the site by /r/The_Donald posters gaming the algorithm back in 2016 is entirely down the memory hole.

Nobody who still uses the site wants to believe they're being hoodwinked again.

Just waiting for Thiel to buy Reddit.

half of its already bots, so im not surprised and it usually the propaganda bots keeping up the engagements. Also i heard reddit wants to make thier post/account history mroe private so its harder to discern a bot.

Versions of them are here already. Their focus right now is to:

• start violence at protests, especially around LA and target cities like NY, Seattle, Chicago, etc.
• seed doubt in anything related to the republican agendas or what they have done. Usually starts with, "I hate trump like the rest of us, but...." or something like that.
• downvote the shit out of people that call anything like the above out. They'll come in later, one by one, to do this.

They usually congregate over the weekend and during or right after major events (like the protest). Watch for them this weekend or stay away from Lemmy. If you watch for it, downvote them and upvote the people fighting them, but most of all, take what everyone says with a grain of salt.

I think it can be difficult to relate to such abstract concepts and consequences that you don't feel directly. After all, it'd be much easier to press on a button that'd kill 10 000 people living 10 000 km away from you than to stab one person to death. Out of sight out of mind.

My point being that I don't think he's indifferent to people that he doesn't know, he's simply not able to process all the ramifications of this particular thing. The effects of data collection and manipulation is quite subtle, after all, like the frog in the slow burning pot

I've heard that's how a lot of wealthy people feel. They want the absolute best for people in their family, and that's about it.

To add to this.

Retirement homes utilize community activity software. Sometimes this will link to health systems like point click care.

When this software company starts wanting you to upload resident profiles so their ai can populate interests? Yeaaaaah they found a work around for your PPI is what that is.

If it wasn't a rush for data already it reallllly is now.

Scary.

Including Lemmy. Especially Lemmy, since it's so easy to create accounts on different instances, or even host your own.