The most powerful country in the world is a large disinformation piñata. You whack it with a few memes and poor decisions come out.
You can’t fault hostile intelligence for giving it a go, and there are a lot of hostile intelligence services.
You can’t fault hostile intelligence
Yeah, I can! 😂
Yeah, the US has been doing this to other countries for decades. The internet just made it more accessible and easier for the rest of the world to participate en masse.
other countries
Somehow I really doubt we exclude ourselves
https://lemmy.world/u/UniversalMonk
One week old account. 684 Comments. 383 Posts. That's 152 posts/comments a day, 9 an hour, and most are over a paragraph long. Almost all of them focus controversially on third-party advocacy in the middle of an election year.
Not saying this account is a bot, but a person would certainly have to be spending a whole lot of time on lemmy to be posting this much in one week so it certainly feels spamish.
haha I just saw an absolutely terrible post by that very real individual
I see that this account has a few topics it posts on. Now, that alone doesn't mean anything. Lots of lemmy users have their 3, 4 topics they are interested in and nothing more. Maybe they are an enthusiastic green party voter.
But that amount of posts in such a short timespan smells like a bot account.
That shitbag also got all my content pulled from /politics where I called him out as a shill, then the mods banned me despite me providing proof of his forum sliding tactics.
Face it, lemmy's already been taken over by the bots and shills, they've infiltrated the mod teams and are now protecting their own. We all saw it happen with reddit and the admins just let it happen here to.
Getting so tired of assholes infiltrating online spaces.
The account isn't a bot, they are a media management account that uses AI content but is ultimately just a person using tools to undermine free discussion.
I subscribe to communities and only read what I'm interested in. So I didn't notice anything. But I know lots of people use Lemmy differently and read the "All" feed. That might be an entirely different perspective.
Tl;dr election year in the US. It's only going to get more intense until the actual election.
On one hand, I hate election years.
On the other hand, as The Economist once had a cartoon pointing out, it could be worse.
You may be in luck! Trump promised that if you vote for him he'll "fix it so good" that you'll never need to vote again.
It's all about the longest running election campaign in the world. The US elections. I don't understand why it needs to be this long 😂. France, the UK, India (over a billion people!) can announce and complete elections quicker than the US.
I would love some more intelligent and nuanced spam filtering but, honestly, I don't think we'll get anything soon enough.
It'll get better in November, but then we'll get a wave of spam about stolen elections. And then better again in January when they finally finish the election game.
I don't understand why it needs to be this long
Money and ratings. Since money is free speech and the media is a receptical for infinite speech, they can engineer a multi year campaign to keep that money flowing in constantly. And making it contentious means more eyeballs on the story and even more money for the media orgs.
Outside of the news and actual politics subs, the only political spam I see on the reg is posts like this complaining about political spam.
Keep in mind that American elections are coming up and Americans think the internet is only about them. So we're not only being dragged into this by disinformation campaigns.
Americans think the internet is only about them
Do we though?
You might not. Many Americans might not. But the internet is annoyingly US-centric and can be frustrating to use as a non-American. A random example: Numerous times I've gone to sign up/purchase something and put "Canada" as the country and the "State" and "Zip code" boxes never changed. I have been denied purchases and registration several times because the website was coded to only accept US zip codes even if I change the country.
So many sites just assume everyone is American, speaking American English, and interested in American things.
Yeah unfortunately it's not primarily astroturfing... these people do it for free
Haven't seen that. But I have seen some users who spend every moment of their lives posting to sway opinion on an issue of their choosing. And if I accurately assess them as Russian paid trolls, I get all my comments removed and I get banned. So that's awesome and fair. Their content stays up, protected by mods. What an awesome feeling.
Israel -Garza trolls/posters too
Edit Little bit ironic funny. In a thread about trolls the trolls come out
Yeah we're all subject to the mind virus that is US general elections.
It's US election year and this is (primarily) an English language site. Is that really a surprise?
Rather than block lists, just subscribe to the lemmy communities that interest you and don't subscribe to political/news communities. Then view lemmy through the "subscribed" feed rather than the "all" feed - no political posts - problem solved.
I trawl through All to find new communities though, and a short blocklist makes that much easier.
It’s been bad for a bit with the tankies here taking every opportunity to make some variant of “genocide Joe” comments but refusing to discuss any of the choices we had and the result of those choices.
They got super-quiet when Biden dropped out. Vanished.
Now we’re getting what appears to be a new wave.
Just blocked politics & news and my quality of life instantly jumped 200%. I highly recommend it. If something significant happens, you'll read about it in another community.
First time?
Don't worry, day after the election they mysteriously vanish as if they were never real at all.
Would be crazy if it were all just disinformation campaigns throwing shit at each other for 12 months.
Luckily no one's stupid enough to fall for all that.
There seems to be a few people suddenly calling Biden racist too, and trying to say both parties are the same. If it quacks like a lobbyist, it is possibly a lobbyist..
But yeah. This is overall probably due to the election more than anything.
People like me (I'm Aussie) will even up vote some things simply because I can't imagine how bad it would be for Trump to win again.. For the entire world.
What is not flooded with political spam these times? And I am afraid we have not seen nothing yet.
Even worse for us that live outside the US. Nothing but US politics every time we scroll. Well, that and Linux stuff.
Nope, keyword filters help
It's been nothing but politics and memes (often about politics) since the first day I joined. I can only imagine how bad it is without my content filters considering how bad it is even with them.
Absolutely, I had to immediately block the politics sublemmy. I noticed this change instantly as I always browse all. Suddenly my front-page was 95% politics posts. As if someone had flipped a lever.
I haven't really noticed much, but that's because I've taken to blocking political communities once they start bothering me by putting too many article links in the front page or being generally rageful.
It is election year in the US, a very polarizing election with two high profile wars, any social media will be weaponized
I've literally been downvoting nothing but random political posts outside of politics communities and still they somehow worm into the hot feed. Mods should take a more serious "no politics spam" rule.
At best, mods seem overwhelmed, especially of meme communities, while at worst, they are okay with such rule violations so long as they agree with the particular brand of politics. I had to start blocking some when they advocate extremist views that I don't find fun to constantly read. This was long before the election ramp-up - like "wouldn't it be fun to skin a landlord alive?", "the only good landlord is a dead landlord", etc.
But it worms its way into many other communities too, so finally I blocked all of lemmy.ml. Blocking lemmy.ml, lemmygrad.ml, and hexbear.net makes the Fediverse fun to be in, rather than a hellscape of extremist propaganda that constantly makes fun of the USA sponsored genocide, while defending genocide committed by Russia or China. I am okay with content regarding genocide, but I prefer a more... "adult" take on the matter, rather than the juvenile crap I was constantly seeing before those blocks.
They are free to speak however they want - but I am also free to not listen.
Not really, but I am from Europe so I don't subscribe to communities connected to US news or politics. Can you give some examples?
Communities like https://lemmy.world/c/independentmormonism, https://lemmy.world/c/independentcatholicism, https://lemmy.world/c/thirdpartynews, all created today, and modded by a 9 day old user account with 640 comments and 334 posts.
Lemmy is another form of social media, and bullshit that happens on social media will come here as more people come here. Your life will be much better if you make full use of blocklists and filtering.
Don't know if you know, but just a heads up for anyone unfamiliar, the proper formatting for linking communities is:
!independentmormonism@lemmy.world
This helps users from other instances browse those communities without leaving their instance and prevents mobile apps from opening the browser. It also supports autofill when typing after the exclamation mark so you can't go wrong.
Yes. There's also been a spike of political commentors that seem normal until you engage with them, then they fire back with emotionally-charged nonsense full of contradictions.
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