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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Conservative Bots and Bad Actors Are Swarming R/Millenials Right Now (www.reddit.com)

submitted 1 month ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/17793163

It's unbelievable how vocal the minority of conservatives on reddit have suddenly gotten in the one sub where a large demographic of important voters often interact. Hmmm. Coincidence?

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[+] [email protected] -34 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) (19 children)

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

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 month ago (6 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 month ago (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 month ago (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 month ago (1 children)

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.