this post was submitted on 21 Jul 2024
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Against Astroturfing and Social Media Manipulation
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Pointing out, fighting, spreading awareness about State sponsored and Company sponsored astroturfing on Lemmy and elsewhere. This includes social media manipulation, propaganda, and disinformation campaigns, among others.
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I agree with yggstyle here, trying to silence your opponents is bad form and can quickly snow ball into fascism.
You just need to counter bots with your bots. We have AI now for Christ sake, it’s really not that hard to train ‘em, deploy ‘em, and manage ‘em
Edit: Santa’s coming to town mfers
https://blog.replit.com/llm-training
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38759877
https://medium.com/intel-analytics-software/create-your-own-chatbot-on-cpus-b8d186cfefb2
Now for creating bot farms, you’re going to need to sail those waters yourself, as they’re often against TOS/UAs, but I don’t think you’ll have to look too hard
Edit: Republicans didn’t like the idea of fighting back ig
It's a bit unclear how any of what you're proposing is supposed to help
Problem: community is being flooded with content A which is diametrically opposed to a content B
Solution: flood content B
… your solution to spam is more spam?
When getting the original spam taken down isn’t going to happen?
Absolutely, yes. Businesses respond to big problems and monetary problems, this is how you effect change.
Well, I do understand your logic at least even though I'm not exactly convinced about the mechanics.
Edit: non-native English speaker here, halp, "convinced about" or "convinced of"?
I think “convinced of” is more correct, but both phrases work. Could also say “convinced on”.
of is more common, but both are grammar.
Ah I somehow had the impression that there was some sort of subtle difference between convinced of/about. Thanks
there is a difference, and youre right, its subtle. subtle enough thtat at this level of discussion, with the context provided, no one could mistake your meaning either way.
since you seem to be curious, "convinced of" refers definitely to being fully persuaded by the relevant subject. look up the dictionary definition of "of" and youll find a bunch of use cases, many of which particularize or otherwise specify something that follows.
"convinced about" is still definite about the conviction, but the word about makes the subject of conviction connotatively less particular. about means something approximate, similar (or perhaps similar enough), or nearby. otoh, it has a perfecty valid use, as in the case in which you used it just now, as a specifying preposition.
They both work, theyre both grammar. "not sure about" is more common than "not sure of". "not convinced of" is more common than "not convinced about". i leave it as an exercise to the reader to puzzle out why that might be.
And i want to clarify I’m not saying spam shit posts, but spamming actual information, articles and actual good content is precisely an equivalent fight to combat flooding propaganda, and a pretty benign one at that when you look at more extreme gorilla tactics
This is simply the reality of what division brings. The second it becomes less about discussion and more about us vs them the topics stop mattering. Discussion breaks down and you have yet another rift our society - regardless of how many people probably are at neither extreme. Anyone with moderate ideals or somewhere in between is ultimately forced to one side or the other ... or trampled by both. It's a disgusting degradation of a culture/society that despite being more connected than ever is finding more and more ways to isolate everyone.
Good on you for speaking up on what you believe. It sucks sometimes but it's better to put the words out there.
Part of the troll factory tactic is to make it a morally grey zone, because they know they have the money and the numbers to materialize it. Indiscriminately doing this is helping them in their effort to lower the information to noise ratio and make their efforts more indistinguishable from "the other side's" turning it into a "well, they would do it too, if they were as successful and had as much money and resources as us" argument.
I'm aware of this tactic. There are a few well documented systems that work very efficiently at splintering groups. The problem with labeling any conversation that falls into the grey area, like it or not, is actually alienating the vast majority of nonpolarized viewpoints. Either you fall in line with faction a or b or you are the enemy of both. Political parties have used this effectively for decades. You beat the majority by splitting them into subfactions. This thread and topic is a spectacular demonstration of the result.
Doesn't matter, if a conversation is likely to influence someone, then that makes it the ideal target for a troll factory. Troll factories also don't just influence one side, they influence any "factions" people might crowd in. The most straightforward solution is eliminating high noise-to-signal ratios, in other words, misinformation and disinformation, and being transparent about it.But that will never be effective against people who just don't care about the noise-to-signal ratio and just care about the information that satisfies their ego. It will never be effective against cults.
There's a reason we need to filter out spam, and there's a reason we need to filter out disinformation and misinformation, it isn't just factions, but yes, it will necessarily devolve conversations into factions because some of them just don't curate the quality of their information.
See but, this isn’t indiscriminate action, I mentioned in another comment that I don’t mean flood shit posts, but to flood with valuable and informative content.
If we cannot stop the pipe from spewing sewage, we have to counter flood with enriched flow to lower the ratio of shit:water.
We will still have a flooding problem, don’t get me wrong, but that is a much larger problem that exists. Republicans have been quoted as stating they just want to muddy waters. We need to flood with water to reduce how muddy they truly are. And certainly not with more mud.
The distinct problem we face is that of busy minds who don’t have the capacity to filter. So they flood with mud to bog down the mind. Hope this makes sense and helps to clear up my intentions/proposed soln.
There are sites that try to do this like ground.news , but the problem I think is that you are misjudging which side has the people really willing to inform themselves and which just accept the information that is convenient for their ego.
I have to disagree with you. Both sides have their fair share of people who are interested in informing themselves, and until we actually have statistics, this is a bias-prone best guess.
Laziness is not inherent to political ideals in any way.
If people informed themselves, there would be no Trumpers.
You son of a bitch, I'm in.