I live in a rural community. Facebook has more or less replaced the web here.
Businesses post their hours, specials, and information on Facebook. Some of them don't have websites. The rec centre has a hard time keeping their website up to date, but the Facebook group is always accurate. Newspapers have closed down, so a Facebook group keeps people apprised of what's going on (it seems to be pretty accurate, since everyone in town is part of it, people involved in events chime in). Kids and adults sports groups advertise and tell their members what's going on via Facebook groups.
It's a shitty medium, since the Facebook algorithm mixes trash advertisements with town-specific events, but it seems to suffice for the town's needs.
I suspect it isn't just my town. The network effect is strong, so I suspect there are niche communities where Facebook is verging on ubiquitous.
When Reddit’s year end recaps were released — which give statistics on activity for individual subreddits such as top posts and comments — they indicated Russia was the third most common country of origin for users visiting many of these [small subreddits for Albertan towns], causing moderators to rethink what was behind the trolling activity they had contended with a few months before.
I don't think there's any question about the interference campaign existing. At this point the question is about influence. How effective are these trolls?
And what was the second country, and why isn't that a problem?
Sometimes being annoying is doing something wrong. If a kid is deliberately being disruptive after repeatedly being told not to, then yeah, they're doing something wrong.
Amazon probably outsourcing to a PR that specializes in union busting.
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But the PR firm that has little technical expertise - they just know they need bots to do some astroturfing.
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So the PR firm outsources to an IT consulting firm.
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But the IT consulting firm only bids on contracts, they don't do the actual work, so they find a subcontractor.
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The subcontractor may hire subcontractors. Continue this step for however many iterations the value of the contract will allow.
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Eventually the subcontractor hires a gig worker or an underpaid staffer to do the minimal amount of work possible.
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The gig worker avoids as much effort as possible, because they're paid by volume rather than time.
At this point the requirements may or may not be fulfilled, but the admins of each org are satisfied, so they move on to the next contract without verifying the work.
Edit: I wrote this facetiously, but u/SpaceNoodle found a news article suggesting at least some of these accounts are legit, as backed up by a Belling Cat investigation.
A bit of background from BuzzFeed.
study shows that the sugar industry paid scientists in the 1960s to downplay the link between sugar and heart disease — blaming saturated fat, instead
Kids are great. Mine spend 5-10 minutes refusing to do a two minute task.
Kind of like how I spend three or four days avoiding a ten minute phone call.
by the screenshots it looks like I've done plenty
Voyager is a copy of the Apollo UI. He's entirely right when he says he's already contributed significantly.
I don't blame him for being grumpy, but I also think it's legit to clone a decent UI. As Voyager matures the UIs will diverge.
Intrusive thoughts are terrifying. It's a testament to our collective willpower that we haven't horrifically murdered each other.
Also, I'm really glad the phrase "intrusive thoughts" came along. It made the whole thing a lot easier to talk about.
The woman's scalds were almost enough to kill her. She spent weeks in hospital and needed skin grafts. To make it worse, McDonald's had received multiple complaints about the temperature of their coffee.
Time to cut some storage costs!
This is satire. Looking at ChrisJBakke's Twitter feed, his posts are jokes. You may not like them. They may not be funny. But they're jokes.
This one echoes a Lemmy post from a few days back:
I think we'd have a much better time on Lemmy if we chilled out. OP posts a lot of decent content, there's no need to shoot the messenger.