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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What irony? Your comment is perfectly legible. Fortunately this hasn't turned out like reddit, where massively downvoted comments get hidden, and the moderators and admins who would ban you for your comments just being "too negative" are either localized to instances or are no longer present.
The only bad thing is you can't normally see and check out who's doing the downvoting, which promotes unverifiable suspicion since people are going to make up their own answer if none is provided anyway, otherwise it's mostly meaningless.
Downvotes are essentially useless in lemmy, and that has proven to be a good thing. It adds nothing and just proves that for some reason a large accounts are tagging your comment negative. If the comment is really bad, plenty of other options to deal with it. It isn't even a cohesive concept for everyone, some people upvote and downvote everything, they cannot think of a world where maybe you just don't have an opinion about something because you are either not interested or its outside of your scope of knowledge.
I do think that the differences in downvotes on Lemmy are overall beneficial. Reddit had this problem far worse - but I still think that opinions should be attached to words. It's a social platform: if you don't want to interact that's your prerogative. While I acknowledge the existence of them I rarely let them direct my statements. It's not batons and tear gas.
That said: I agree with your final statements... not everyone needs to participate in every conversation (we can still read and form opinions.)
Objectively how you feel about a call for brigadeing a particular viewpoint? Yes, I will give you that a lot of the shit posted by some of these groups is deplorable, but does that give us the right to simply ostracize the group as a whole?
You've made some good and valid points- I'm looking forward to your response. Cheers.
I think that Lemmy is just step in the road towards a better system. I frankly would prefer a system that was truly federated - where communities wouldn't be hosted by a particular server, but rather, just a group of moderators and curators you could tailor, where each server could remove the messages they each deem to offensive by the most flagrant violators but it would be up to particular moderators / curators you choose to curate the comments that would show under a given tag and whose upvotes/downvotes should be discarded for a more fine-tuned experience.
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.
Education is a form of brigading a particular viewpoint, the problem in today's world is accepting information that has poor noise-to-information ratio, which gives a skewed view of things. Every site and instance should have a right to curate its content, and you can even develop dedicated information sources like ground.news if you want to look at how information is getting skewed.
But it isn't something that's happening equally across sides, because the sides that are actually being molded are those that respect the purpose and ideals of a government versus those that see it as a means to an ends, and it is the latter that has a much, much higher noise-to-information ratio which should be respected about as much as one respects spam.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.