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
!shirtsthatgohard@lemmy.world
Removed by mod
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.
And using LLMs, then eventually getting useful idiots involved as well.
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.
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.
“those people opposed to our glorious leader are surely from our external enemies ethnic group!”
Do you even realize how xenophobic you sound?
Another lemmy.ml troll…
Was that supposed to go to somebody else?
This you?
Calling out foreign election meddling. Yes.
those damn foreigners, always meddling.
can you see why we call you blue maga?
Nope. I can’t see. I want all governments to stay out of the elections of all other countries.
And who is “we,” the tankies? The poseur communists? The KGB? The Xi bitches?
Did I miss one?
You seem paranoid, to put it mildly. "We " being the people who aren’t bought into the whole qanon thing you have going.
Meanwhile, our Lord and Savior PugJesus is singlehandedly taking the fight to the trolls.
I’m just trying to remind them they aren’t welcome in decent places. I wouldn’t go to .ml or worse, Hexbear or grad, if you paid me.
Nope, not a bot and anti-Biden registered Dem. You guys always want to Strawman anti-Biden comments as either “angry conservatives” or “Russian-psyops”. You don’t actually address the concerns either, just brush them off as trolls. Discourse on Lemmy is a echo-chambered joke already. It doesn’t need trolls to ruin it, you’ve done plenty well yourselves.