This isn’t about immediately filtered content, like the disgusting DuffMan George Floyd meme, or Holocaust denial. That’s pretty well kept in check by mod tools. I’m also not talking about cogent or even pointed political discussion.
I’m not even talking about necessarily in this community directly, however in a lot of other spaces I’ve noticed a lot of accounts using divisive language and terms like “The ineffectual left” “single issue voters” “ignorant right wing morons”. Lots of straw man arguments, lots of willful ignorance.
I’m not a centrist, I’m very very very far left however I know well enough not to patently dismiss the talking points of others, outside of course calls to genocide. I know what dog whistles sound like, and I’m hearing a lot of them lately.
Most egregiously I’m seeing very long form post replies that read very much like what is generated from LLMs.
So I guess my question is, how’re we all fairing with what might be the largest Turing test ever?
I’ve noticed a huge influx of anti-Biden posts and comments, to the extent that I honestly think we’re finally getting the reddit treatment. I remember there, when the Russian Internet connection went down, and for like a day all those kinds of posts nearly evaporated. And it seems like those accounts don’t just do the overtly political things, they also engage in other areas, usually with a conservative slant.
Yeah, that’s a lot of what I’ve been seeing, bad faith actors sowing dissent.
Edit: ducking autocorrect
Sowing*
Are you certain? They could be making clothing with divisive messages.
/Jk
Pretty sure this was child labour, not actors.
Yeah lots of anti-Bidens. Totally Russian trolls.
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/05/15/us/politics/russia-disinformation-election.html
It’s starting, for sure. Assuming it ever really stopped, that is.
We used to think that if we had user-generated content, we would all be immune to governments, corporations and other powerful actors spreading propaganda because we would get our information from each other, not them.
Turns out: governments, corporations, other powerful actors are perfectly capable of paying “users” to “generate content” and not even disclose this.
The Internet used to be an exciting development, now it’s just like, yeah it exists, so what.
I remember, after being on the internet for a while, when the www standard was being adopted and all the web pages started popping up. It was so cool to see the kinds of content people were using it for. Then we got search engines like altavista, and it honestly seemed magical. It was like this egalitarian utopia, where all this knowledge was available to everyone; it was hard not to feel like it was the start of an amazing new phase for society.
So it was just soul crushing to me when we first started seeing intentional manipulation and misinformation. Search results that were skewed by paid advertisements or google bombing, propaganda being pushed into discussion forums, and all the fake news… it all represented the end of that amazing new phase. Heartbreaking.
Oh man when i was young and go to play and explore with my Neopets, downloading things on limewire & chatting on msn messenger after dialling in to the ‘internet’ was magical.
I should check on my neopets, it’s been… A while.
If this were the Dreamcast, Leonard Nemoy would be giving you shade from beyond the grave.
I am too young for that, but I do remember discovering the concept of wikis and finding it amazing that websites could now be written by their audience.
A fairly dead concept by now, nowadays the entire rest of the Internet is more interesting than wikis.
No. Wikis will always be the coolest.
…also I’m not cool.
paying “users”
And using LLMs, then eventually getting useful idiots involved as well.
I remember there, when the Russian Internet connection went down, and for like a day all those kinds of posts nearly evaporated.
Oh shit, I remember this one. For a short time Reddit became a loooooooooot friendlier. Not friendly but friendlier. You could have a nice conversation with someone opposing your views and it came to an actual trade of insights. I valued that a lot. No fucking derailment with stupid ass nonsense and childish jibes. (At least for the most part. Reddit is after all Reddit)
Yeah, for sure. And before that time I used to wonder how much truth there was in the idea of the Russian troll farms - it seemed a bit like a conspiracy theory, even though it was pretty well documented in the Mueller report. But that day was such a dramatic demonstration. The whole site suddenly shifted so much to the left, and the toxicity dropped so much lower.
Ah yes, Mr RustyFish. I see you support Fishell Rustic Sanders for ruler of earth, purely based on his pro-fish stances.
We may agree in a fish court, or even a basketball court, but at the end of the day, you win some, I win some, and we both smell like fish for having tried your suggestion of chopping up dead fish that washed ashore already dead…and running their guts and bodies all over our hair and bodies.
Now I fear we’re two naked strangers slathering each other in fish corpses.
Maybe there are people that are outside of America and don’t have direct impact of who wins the election and they don’t have to blindly praise biden. Trump is a piece of shi but acting like criticizing Biden is some kind of a foreign conspiracy is funny.
Criticising him? No.
Criticising him and going “I’m not gonna vote for genocide Joe”?
Yes.
If you were Putin, you’d do everything in your power to see Trump elected. And if you pretend Russian troll factories don’t exist then we know you’re in one.
Just look at my comments downvotes. It really is about people being angry at others criticizing biden.
I did not mention anything about voting btw just to be clear. I just don’t like the left behaving like the right. People should be free to criticize any leader. Just because orange man can do it worse doesn’t mean you should let biden run around doing anything he wants. We should demand for people’s best interests and well being.
No, it’s because you’re ignorant.
Ignorant of what?
The fact that other countries are absolutely trying to influence the US election by criticizing Biden, especially the Kremlin.
Yes a Trump victory is better for enemies of the US.
Yes Democrats/Biden are making a lot of dumb moves and doing their damn best to lose.
Plenty of “genocide Joe”, lib bashing, “both sides”, implication that if you vote for Biden you’re complicit in genocide, and many other anti-vote and anti-democrat posts all around.
Not sure what you’re reading that constitutes “dog whistles”, there have been some posts mocking right wing responses and some fediverse self-policing and knee jerk reactions to the female trapped in the forest with either man or bear discussion that have already gone through several evolutions and iterations.
The mockery of singe issue voters is deserved taken in the context of the failure to vote being trump fascism and even more genocide. Not sure what you’re trying to offer there other than what? We should listen to more open to “genocide Joe” comments and become immobilized with ambivalence and again, let fascism win by inaction?
Personally, I’m not hearing dog whistles. I’m reading people directly trying to influence opinion to not vote for Biden by any means necessary while willfully and actively avoiding any consequences to a trump win.
I’m reading people directly trying to influence opinion to not vote for Biden by any means necessary while willfully and actively avoiding any consequences to a trump win
Exactly, Kremlin shills and trolls using Israel’s genocide as a wedge issue to get their asset into the White House again so he cuts support for Ukraine and pulls out of NATO.
Wait… single issue politics is a real, proven, thing. Don’t lump that in with ad hominem attacks. If you’re not going to vote for someone you otherwise would because of a single issue, you’re a single issue voter.
And an idiot
While I do absolutely agree that single issue politics is a real thing like you showed, literally the only reply to your comment was “if you are a single issue voter, you’re an idiot”.
So I also think OP has a point here and we’re talking more about the people who use the term as an ad hominem attack, which I certainly have seen plenty of. And now Lemmy has provided us with yet another example of people taking something legitimate and turning it into a weakness/attackable offence. Like some trolls and racist people on the right now talk about DEI in negative terms
Fair points. I’m guilty of just saying “single issue voters,” without elaborating on every comment. That could easily be seen as an indirect ad-hominem attack. Maybe I should make a copy-pasta response for whenever I see someone arguing for single-issue decision making.
That said, there are justifiable single-issue decisions. If Trump was spouting rhetoric about shutting down all support of Israel, yeah. I can stand behind folks “switching sides” over this. Free Choice, ditto. 2A I have a harder time with, but that’s because there are usually so many other issues that you’d think are more important. Not my decision, but I have less sympathy for people who think being able to own a gun is more important than the ability to unionize.
Anyhoo, like I said: fair points.
It’s election season, so get used to this. Other countries have learned how to divide us using social media, not to mention the years of experience Fox New and Co. have in doing just that. On top of it, we now have AI generated posts to contend with. It’s not getting better anytime soon…personally, I just ignore any post that sounds like it’s inflammatory (which sadly are almost all political posts, and everything Musk).
I think some communities might benefit from a very strict no-politics rule. Because this right wing trolling is ruining lemmy for me.
There’s a lot of left wing trolling as well, even more so imo.
Like when all the rightoids show up to a discussion and spam image macros of pigs shitting on their own balls?
Get real, this is a left-centered platform, 98% of the trolls aren’t right wing, not by a country mile.
Who decides what is/isn’t politics?
everything is political when the right wing is desperate for culture wars and division.
Seriously. Remember this when it comes time to vote. Their goal with all of this is to emotionally and mentally exhaust you so you give up before its voting time.
That’s political innit
Hilarity.
“Right wing” for this community is if someone is a capitalist.
Ya’ll have a super left wing echo chamber that’s freaking out about any dissent.
This sort of shit is exactly why everyone is a political extremist now. You insert yourselves into communities that only agree with you.
In which way Capitalism isn’t right wing?
Not feeling that, but I block hexbear and lemmygrad
Aren’t they already defederated from everything and anything in the known universe?
They’re fighting to remain federated; they feel the disdain from every sane /c and can (surprisingly) see the writing on the wall this time that soon they’ll have to make sockpuppet accounts if they want to continue to troll.
Where are they fighting to stay federated? They don’t seem to give a shit
Yea afaik I remember reading several posts from hexbear users saying they were fine before federation and are fine with the idea of defederation. Don’t know if that’s representative
Yes it has been a stark difference that picked up this month. I was in what used to feel like a chill community and the sheer vitriol of the threads the past week has been really annoying.
Yes, that’s absolutely the point of my post. Big upswing in bad actors.
Removed by mod
Removed by mod
Removed by Todd
Its just another inflammatory post to rally everyone in a single direction. Either worry or don’t worry. Your choice.
I have a comment on my profile where I express some observations about the cyber truck that weren’t expressly negative and it was down voted to hell.
Maybe not so many trolls, but there’s a lot of pretentiousness.
Just like with Reddit, there are a lot of people who use the downvote button if they just disagree, which isn’t really the intent. So you’re likely to get downvotes for any unpopular subjective opinion.
Yeah I generally agree with that.
I find that people really put a lot of stock into how much they like or dislike something subjectively rather than looking at it from an objective perspective.
But if a post gets tons of downvotes, it’s not necessarily or even often because people don’t like the opinion. It’s usually because it was pure opinion stated as a fact or in hostile language or in unreadable writing or the user was otherwise behaving like an asshole.
Yeah, there’s for sure a lot of that
yes, very much. i’ve been telling my partner it may be time to give up on Lemmy.
the ones that kill me are the long-form posts that seem to be making one point then pivot in the middle and get confusing. they’re just muddying the waters but people who don’t read past the first sentence or two upvote so they gain traction.
Gish gallop. It’s a common tactic used by authoritarians with no real arguments.
Is it simply just the political majority starting to catch up with Lemmy and its extreme left ideology?
Also i know a guy who runs a bunch of llm powered bots to produce flat earth propaganda flatgpt one could say. There are some beautiful argument chains.
I’ve also run into some cases where u can do a little prompt injection and it starts saying potato instead of any noun.
I’ve had a lot of strawman arguments used against me lol. It’s just the internet, I find
I see more posts about “have you seen this or that in lemmy recently” or “lemmy is worse than reddit” posts more often than these supposed trolls. Sure they exist but all of the time they are down voted or deleted.
There is also someone saying in the comments that criticizing biden is a foreign conspiracy. Some of these Americans just look like a reflection of the right but call themselves left. I’m not American so I face no real threat(as far as I’m aware) regardless of who gets elected there. So I just think you can criticize “both sides” people without making your leader look immortal
Do you ever sort by hot? Or are you mainly in the default sort?
I’m on default and there’s always posts like this every week. Last week it was about the bear and how supposedly lemmy is more mysogynist than reddit. Before it was about how lemmy is too one sided and all the comments agreeing are zionists ranting that their comments get downvoted so apparently lemmy is filled with reddits ban list.
I don’t have any problem with this but I left reddit cause I was getting more posts about rants about some other bad posts than the bad post’s themselves. Example stremio addons subreddit. That shit was filled with entitled miserable people angry that free software was being used by new people. I never saw that much toxicity even on any arch linux forums.
There are some instances like hexbear, lemmy.ml, lemmygrad that I see people using words left may not like. But it’s definitely not as bad as it’s portrayed. Blocking these can help.
My sort is hot, I’m often seeing posts you never see I guess.
Only during the night. They turn to stone during the daytime.
Fight stupid with stupid.
In this case, random copypastas are one thing that works well. Wastes their time, and communicates the fact that you think they are stupid. *cue Undertaker copypasta*
Also, would be great if every community had the tiananmen copypasta stickied.
I don’t think that’ll help anyone to be honest. Usually that approach just feeds the issue of Poe’s law which empowers radicalization.
Me? No, and I’ve been around for a while
