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 4 months 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] 2 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago) (1 children)

I think that Lemmy is just step in the road towards a better system. I frankly would prefer a system that was truly federated...

Figuring out a platform that can both cater to the needs of others while being a center for good discussion is a massive challenge. Lemmy certainly has its flaws but is decidedly better for its decentralized nature. I view it as a work in progress which, at some point, may turn into something better. I think we agree there.

Regarding upvotes and downvotes, requiring at least a reason and showing who made a downvote would definitely be a plus in my book, and would allow you to judge the reliability and judgement of people whom you might choose in your customized group of moderators/curators.

Absolutely. If you are willing to cash a vote you should be willing to stand by it. Better still if you are willing to expand on the topic with your input.

Education is a form of brigading a particular viewpoint...

I get what you are saying but I think I would express this: education can contain indoctrination - but indoctrination rarely is educational.

Education should be expanding knowledge with which to build opinions and ideas from - whereas indoctrination states and immutable rule that you shouldn't question.

Brigadeing is indoctrination, without question. And I think that's probably what you were getting at.

To your point about ground news and having a clear view of biases: I believe we need to go back to when news was reported on in a neutral way. No stories, no sensationalism: just facts. Let the people decide how to parse it.

But it isn't something that's happening equally across sides

This is partially perception and survivors bias. Platform to platform - community to community - you will see what rises to the surface differ. Voting systems and brigadeing will influence people to only behave in a particular way. The unfortunate thing is eventually you end up with a well programmed group of yes-men. This is the flaw in current iterations of social media. A byproduct of this is people who have little to no tolerance for any opposing viewpoints which is awful for a multitude of reasons.

I'm not sure if I have much to add beyond this. You hit the nail on the head in a lot of your points. I feel like a lot of people probably sense these things unconsciously but struggle to identify them.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 4 months ago

From a personal perspective, if you are ok with it, it's education, and if you are not, it's indoctrination. The most objective and practical way to approach information is determining the reliability, truthfulness, verifiability and reproducibility of information provided by good sources over bad ones. Trying to do that for every piece of information is basically looking through spam.

A good education is not indoctrination, as it must be able to question itself for it to be good. Yet it must also curate against bad, flawed, or fallible arguments by necessity. There might be any number of curators and sources, but they do exist and they must be discerning. Allowing all and any type of arguments makes people a casualty of statistics of whatever arguments have the greatest presence in their attention spans, something easily stacked by troll factories, and can be saturated with disinformation and echoed through misinformation, making people consider the greys between smoke screens. Through this oversaturation, their perspective of the world can become quite indoctrinated if there is no discernment.