PhilipTheBucket @ PhilipTheBucket @ponder.cat

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595

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1 yr. ago

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No one will know for certain, people will argue, those bots will argue, other bot accounts with the same agenda will argue, people will be manipulated, they will argue, and status quo returns…

Fair enough. I do think this happens. At the same time I don't see that there's a lot to be gained by being super sensitive about it, or deciding to freak out and abandon the topic because of some people arguing.

I would say that every so often, I wander into one of the lemmy.world political communities and I have exactly the reaction you are expressing here. It's just random aggressive people, some of whom I think are deliberately trying to inflame conflict and prejudice, and they drown out anything useful. It's a waste of time, so I don't fuck with it. I guess the point that I'm trying to make is that not everything is that way. I would say the vast majority of things I observe on Lemmy are not that way.

Or, they're not what I would describe that way. You seem like you're maybe talking about something different, and accusing the conversations I like of being something deliberately designed to waste my time that I should be able to "rise above" or etc. But you also don't want to give examples, so IDK, not much I can do with that.

So check out this example. I'll give my take on it:

https://ponder.cat/post/2904223

I think there are some people there who are just there to stir shit. But, I would say the great majority at least of what I was paying attention to is productive. I learned about some propaganda, learned the shape of the media landscape, from some previous interactions, and then in that thread we got to talk about some other issues related to that, and work some things out.

Yeah, if you focus on the idiots exclusively, then your interaction will be unproductive. I do definitely think that yes.

By talking about ‘anything of substance’ is being framed by the bot posts, repeatedly, to manipulate. But, take a step back and you’ll realise it really isn’t ‘anything of substance’ but something to distract.

If you feel strongly enough about this topic to be concerned that people are going to be taken in by it, give some examples. By being vague and evasive about what it is you're talking about, you make it impossible for anyone to learn about what you're saying if you have something of value to try to make a point about, and also impossible for them to make counterpoints if they disagree with you. It just all stays in waste-of-time-land. Which is, ironically, exactly the issue you are trying to raise.

If you're concerned that people will disagree with your categorizations, and that'll just be so upsetting that you can't bear the thought of doing it as a result, I feel like this whole issue may be more of a you problem than a Lemmy problem.

As for the early internet, I think you’re thinking about early pre-banhammer-FBI-raid 4-chan.

Not even close. I was talking about Usenet, early BBS culture and anonymous FTP days, then the more modern era of Napster / Slashdot / Rotten.com / the little proliferation of forums and personal sites came after those "old days," and 4chan was created a little bit after that.

Everyone is going to have different definitions of when "early" is, but "the internet" goes back quite a long way before 4chan. 4chan and Myspace were kind of the first iteration of the massive everyone-goes-to-the-same-place omni-site model that presaged the horrors to come.

1. It's not clear exactly what you mean, what are some examples of posts that you think are being made by bots?
2. IDK man, there is definitely a problem of misleading and disinformative posts and I will 100% agree with it as a problem, but just abandoning the idea of being able to talk about anything of substance because the disinfo is trying to fuck it up is not the answer, to me. I like being able to talk about politics / anti-capitalism / geopolitics / whatever. I don't find it "stressful" or the way some people receive it. If they don't want it presumably they are not subscribed to that stuff, but I really value being able to find out what's going on in the world and talk with a wide variety and population of people about it.
3. The early internet was wild. It was not for hobbies and betterment, it was for ludicrous conspiracy theories, arguments between creationism and evolution, far flung neo-Nazis finally being able to communicate with each other, and snuff videos. That was what made it awesome. I think you are thinking of early Facebook.

Not only that, this law has also in 99.9% of cases that I am aware of been enforced against the user who made the comment, not the site owner. Literally the only time I'm aware of it being enforced against the site owner is with Twitter, which kind of makes sense to me because (1) it is actually antisemitism in that case, not just "I wish Zionism would go away" and then BAN, (2) Twitter was actually arguably the source and the boosting agent for a lot of the antisemitism, it wasn't just a neutral forum where people could go on and maybe break the law all on their own initiative.

But yes, it is also relevant that brought up "our hardware could get confiscated" when it is the flimsiest of flimsy theories for how it could even happen, even if we assume that they were going to get raided somehow. I get it. No one wants the police to come talk to them, it's easy for me to talk over here safe (ho ho) in the USA. But the level of threat they are quaking in their boots over is very minimal. Very.

admins can’t change the law

Neither could the people that hid Anne Frank. And yet, somehow, they found a way.

This is developing into some top tier Lemmy drama.

@CommanderCloon@lemmy.ml said:

These kind of posts will, sometime in the future, be referenced in a memorial of some sort as complacency in the face of crimes against humanity.

History will not look kindly at you.

Which is think is pretty fucking on point.

I saw that user was banned, which is a whole different level of fuckery. I got curious why the ban. It turned out it wasn't for sticking of Palestine, it was because they had said:

I would agree with that if Ukraine didn't have a history of murdering and bombing the regions Russia has taken.

And, of course, they were promptly temp banned for saying that.

It was also, langage / phrasing issues and Wikipedia's carefully worded hedging notwithstanding, originally a Zionist phrase. It only became a crisis when the people to whom all that 100% of the land had originally belonged wanted it back, and were talking about employing the same kinds of violence that had already been employed against them, and using more or less the exact same slogan to talk about what they wanted (wanted back.)

I would go beyond this. I would say that any instance that makes a habit of policing its users' statements to make sure they conform to some kind of politics and don't offend whatever type of powerful grouping should get fucked.

To me, the fact that an extraordinarily obedient-in-advance reading of German law requires them to do this isn't really relevant. The chance that the admins will get in significant trouble for it is minimal. If this is their bar for standing up for the rights and the survival of others, fuck 'em. It's not my freedom or money at stake, so that's easy for me to say, but I'm in the US, you could make a strong argument that being an anti-Trump pain in the ass on the internet could carry a significant risk in the future depending on how things go down. At a certain point, you have to decide what you stand for, and if your government isn't on board for it, then oh well and let's see.

Also: As much as I agree in particular with the disgusting nature of censoring anything pro Palestinian for obvious "bro aren't you worried about going to hell" type of reasons, I actually don't think anyone should be "required" to have any certain position on Palestine to participate on Lemmy. I think it's fine if people disagree and talk about it. I think the critical thing is the admins policing what opinions people can express. If you're going to be on Lemmy and you want to help people communicate, deliberately distorting the conversation to make it comfortable for the powerful people needs to get all the way the fuck out.

I have no particular standing to call for SDF to do anything in particular, I'm just saying my opinion. It's maybe a little incongruous to go all the way to defederation, when there are instances that are just as shameless about censoring speech that is just as blatant an issue of "right and wrong" as the Palestine issue is. I feel like taking a step back and talking about the nature of the network and what we want to have and whether you as an instance owner have the right to police "your" users in this way. In my view, you don't, but most people seem to feel that you do. It's an issue that goes way beyond feddit.org and maybe should get some more thought as opposed to one-off decisions.

It's all just stories, stories and habits.

Did your water come on when you turned on the tap today? Well, somebody somewhere has a checklist they're in the habit of doing, because they've been given the idea that it's important. They will never meet you, probably, and it wouldn't impact them directly in any way if you didn't have water. But, because of all the habits of them, you, and all the people in-between the two of you that connect you: You got to drink and shower, instead of having to hike to a well in the back yard.

Same for the people that built your cell phone, same for the people that decided that you can have groceries at the store because you told your side of the story, same for the people keeping Mahmoud Khalil in prison or letting him go. Don't ever let people tell you stories in the head are not important. They're near top of the list of the most important things we have.

The majority of these people that are visible online are likely just literal teenagers trying to deep dive into concepts they have no foundational understanding of and glomming onto whatever sounds the best to their 14 year old, completely externally enforced, worldview.

I 100% agree with this. I was actually confused for a long time by how people on Lemmy.ml are so universal about using the same types of bad thought patterns and arguments… they came across as genuine, individual people, not like some of the propaganda accounts that all employ the same lazy dishonest methods because they are literally just reading from the same handbook. But certain ways of looking at things and flaws in their critical thinking, all the .ml people just happen to share (or it happens to be really common for users there). It was really odd and I couldn’t understand it.

I have reached a tentative conclusion that maybe they just tend to be young or be really unfamiliar with reading critically or being rigorous about judging an argument… and that is why they are still comfortable on .ml. I think it is self-selecting. They wouldn’t be there if they weren’t taken in by certain types of failed logic, because that is the logic that is enforced from above over there.

I’m still not 100% sure but it kind of seems to me like that is what is going on.

Pointing out this stuff like this post does, showing how information warfare gets injected into discourse and hidden as real journalism, is the exact thing that causes this discordant worldview to stop holding weight. The more exposure this gets the less likely people will just take some report and form an opinion completely unaware that opinion is the manufactured outcome of the organization publishing that report.

Completely agree with this also. I don’t think deleting or blocking this stuff is the answer, because that will always be a temporary solution. I think vigorously pushing back on it is the answer for exactly the reason that you said.

Lies in public discourse isn’t anywhere near a new problem, and humans do have methods to deal with it. It just takes time and it takes a sensible community where some of the tools that can give traction to the truth can get some leverage.

So long as people are willing to care for one another and stand up against injustice they are not my enemy. Learn to identify and counteract the actual bad actors with information so that anyone who mistakenly comes across their viewpoint is immediately greeted by a counterpoint from a real person with a conscience.

Yeah. Even Trump voters, I don’t really think are “the enemy.” Self defense is fine, they can be deadly dangerous in the short run. But in the long run they are more than anything victims of that same powerful machine, and the way to save ourselves will be to save them from it, too, so we can all survive together.

But then where will I deploy my AI moderator?

Yeah. I've started to get suspicious of people who go out of their way to tell you that they are bold leftist media, and they're bringing a needed perspective that is super-vital and not just all propaganda and lies like everything else is. It sort of reminds me of those bank billboards that say, "To us, you're more than just a number."

Update: It looks to me at least pretty likely that !altmedia@altmedia.house is also Russian propaganda. Maybe they just wanted to post this thing, and are short of any of the critical thinking skills that would let them evaluate my argument that MPN is Russian when I told them it was. Mostly they seem to be posting pro-Palestinian stuff from reliable sources. But, the sidebar is super sus to me.

Until January 2nd, 2025 the 'WorldNews` subreddit, with 40 million users automatically subscribed, had an ‘Israel at War’ livethread constantly at the top.

This community was founded to dissent from this forced perspective, and present the Palestinian and anti-establishment position in general.

Fine. I actually completely agree with this, I took a quick look at some of the pinned /r/worldnews threads about Israel's wars and "wars" and they're completely full of pro-Israel bullshit. My initial assumption is that the inherent corruptibility of the Reddit / Lemmy moderation model has rendered /r/worldnews subject to propaganda from Israel, but who knows. But yes it's some bullshit.

https://www.reddit.com/r/worldnews/comments/1h3nk2e/rworldnews_live_thread_israel_at_war_thread_79/

It's a little bit weird that they are pretending that anything on Lemmy needs to have this pro-Palestinian iconoclasty brought to bear, when everyone on Lemmy is pro-Palestinian anyway, but sure, whatever. Anyway, reading further:

This community is ‘AltMedia’ in the Mearsheimer and Walt sense. Not the Richard Spencer sense.

Not sure why those are the only two options...

And then below that is where it goes off the rails.

This community likes

John Mearsheimer

Good stuff if a little bit of an odd choice for the number 1.

Edward Said, Noam Chomsky

Great stuff

Chris Hedges

Well that's an odd choice. All I really know about the guy is some email list that gets sent to me that has his name on it which occasionally says some very bizarre stuff. For example "The internet, from its inception, was created to be a tool of mass surveillance. It was developed first as a counterinsurgency tool for the Vietnam War and the rest of the Global South, but like many devices of foreign policy naturally it made its way back to U.S. soil." He apparently used to be an extremely bold anti-Iraq War voice back in those days, which is obviously fantastic, but since then...

Hedges began hosting the television show On Contact for the Russian-government owned network RT America in June 2016. Hedges, who has claimed not to have known much about the network at the time, was approached to make a show by RT America president Mikhail "Misha" Solodovnikov, who promised him complete editorial independence.[44][57]

On Contact provided commentary on social issues, often profiling nonfiction authors and their recently published works, with Hedges aiming to follow the approach of former public television shows. On Contact was nominated for an Emmy in 2017, RT America's first significant award nomination, but the award was won by Steve.[44]

On March 3, 2022, RT America ceased operations following the widespread deplatforming of Russian-sponsored media caused by the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine.[44] The run of On Contact ended.

Hedges supported Green Party candidate Jill Stein in the 2016 election.[44]

On May 27, 2020, Hedges announced that he would run as a Green Party candidate in New Jersey's 12th congressional district for the 2020 elections. After being informed the following day that running for office would conflict with FCC fairness doctrine rules because he was at that time hosting the nationally broadcast RT America television show On Contact, Hedges decided not to pursue office in order to keep hosting the show.[63][64]

Anyway. Back to the list:

Scott Ritter, Glenn Greenwald, Tucker Carlson

I don't recognize all that many of the names on their list. But, the people that they "like" that I do recognize that are in any way active in the modern day, there is a very distinct through-line (pretty much universal) about how those people feel about the invasion of Ukraine.

Anyway, YSK.

I'm shocked, I say.

This site has some kind of malicious advertising that hijacked my phone refusing to let me close or switch to other tabs until I clicked its dialog boxes. Boo hiss

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aGSKrC7dGcY

What the fuck

TIL. I'm so confused by this concept.

https://www.reddit.com/r/Anarchy101/comments/142zr10/what_does_critical_support_mean_in_leftist_spheres/

What level in school did these guys reach that this idea needs a special word for it? Like yes, of course you are allowed to support one action or portion of something but still be critical of the bad stuff, or of that thing as a whole. That's... that's how it works. If you're not some kind of "YAAAAAY MY COUNTRY hooray forever" idiot, then that should be how you look at everything. You decide whether something that's happening is good or bad, and then you express your support or not accordingly. This whole thing where it is relevant in any respect "which side" is doing the good or bad thing, in order for it to be good or bad or whether and how we need to talk about it, is some State Department bullshit that has no place in a normal person's brain.

Do they imagine that there are a lot of people who go around uncritically supporting Ukraine / Democrats / NATO / whatever, just because they decided to like them? And that they need to distinguish that their support for their causes is the other kind? I kind of agree with the person who said that in practice it seems to boil down to "Fuck Putin, but Ukraine should just roll over and stop fighting" more often than not. I don't really know, but that is the only way that to read this that makes sense to me, the on-the-surface reading seems just bizarre and pointless.

There are already .ml people in here, whataboutisming hard.

Not all of them! Only the ones that want to regulate.

Also most of the other ones also

Yeah. And yeah, it is a huge problem. I don’t know how we let the absolutely vital task of keeping tabs on what’s going on and publishing it, get tangled up with the profit motive, but I think it’s fair to say that it was a catastrophic blunder. On par with trying to run a private national highway system or a private national military.

But you can’t FOIA on deadline, and the editor would still rather have something local for tonight from the beat reporter – whatever it may be – than running 10 more inches of wire.

I feel like the underlying problem of shallow coverage and lack of time is definitely there, but in a lot of cases it seems like the pendulum has swung all the way around to where the shoot from the hip local news take has become “of course the cops fucked up and shot this random person” in every case now, even when the facts don’t support it.

There are of course news outlets and people who still take the “cops can do no wrong” stance on it. Actually almost everyone decides to fall into one camp or another on every single case, regardless of what the facts support. But I think the issues of time and energy to get it right are just as likely to induce an anti-cop narrative in the present day (interviewing some random family member of a person involved in the incident who may be an unreliable narrator) as a pro-cop one.