It's a bit trickier to have a stable and efficient disinformation apparatus in place when you change governments every 4 years. Whatever is directly supported by the government would have to be supported by both the Trump and the Biden cabinets, or start from scratch every fourth year. The Kremlin doesn't have that problem.
Of course, the US military and certain other institutions tend to run their own side show. We all know the US was tapping phone lines in Berlin for decades, and there's little reason to believe they have fundamentally changed.
As a European, I'm just somewhat more worried about Russia at the moment, considering their support for the far right, successful effort to get Trump elected, the war in Ukraine, and all that. But by all means, I'm not naive to the US either, and I'm not sure why you would assume that I am.
It's still absurd to me that this is something one would even need to say.
The sentence "don't vote for Ted Cruz" has the same vibe to it as "don't shit your pants in the supermarket". It feels like something that shouldn't need to be said.
Russian disinformation campaigns are basically everywhere in Western democracies at this point, they're just hard to measure and to formally pin on the Kremlin directly.
I think it's unfair to the hard working people of the Kremlin to exclude any election featuring Geert Wilders, Nigel Farage, or Marine Le Pen from this list.
I think his last two braincells just died in a head-on collision while partaking in a fatal debate with a twelve year old. We sadly have to write him off.
What is it with these guys anyway? Is that what happens to your voice if you perform fake macho deep voice for everything you say 50 solid years in a row? They speak as if they're children trying to pretend to have hit puberty, just with the gnarly voice of a 70 year old chain smoker.
I'm happy it's working for you! Communick also seems to be a bit of a different concept than paying a monthly fee for a user on a Mastodon instance.
At least personally, I'm willing to give a monthly contribution to my Mastodon instance to keep it up and running, but if it started charging its users (even if it was a smaller sum than what I currently contribute) I would cut the donations and flee elsewhere. I guess I'm neither a rational consumer nor a "good" supporter, but that's just who I am I guess.
Of course it's great if people can have healthy transactional relationships. And we need to normalize paying for products like software and social media, even if it's available for free. But having the user-generated internet hidden behind a paywall will not, for me, ever be an acceptable solution.
I don't even disagree, but the amount of left-wing misinformation posted around here is astronomical.
It's also well known that Russian misinformation campaigns are seeking to increase polarization, so they are actively producing bullshit media on both ends of the political spectrum. Their goal is not (exclusively) to push European societies to the right, but to sow division by pulling people to the extreme on both sides. The bad actors don't care which extreme you go to.
I personally think centrist are cowards, and right-wing people are either naïve or evil. I'm firmly planted on the left. But that's exactly why I consider the main threat in my media stream to be disinformation targeted precisely at people like myself: Left wing, believable, almost completely correct, but tailored for radicalization.
And by god, there's a lot of it. I'm being told on a daily basis to hate; that voting for Harris is the same as murdering children; that all Israelites are full of hate, never mind the huge protests in Tel Aviv or any of the numerous accounts of internal resistance; that the UN cannot be trusted, despite them being under constant attack by Israel, not Palestine; that Ukraine is responsible for dragging on their war against Russia.
Reality has a liberal bias, but that doesn't mean it's not incredibly easy to produce misinformation with a leftist spin. And it's being spread like wildfire in certain corners of Lemmy.
Well, there's a whole horde of people seeking to discredit Wikipedia as well, whining as loud as they can about its bias in one direction or another.
It's information warfare, and it's pretty exhausting. And it's impossible to tell who has ulterior motives and who's just a moron. Creds to the Lemmy.world crowd for putting up with it at all.
Of course this media fact checking site is not perfect. But if your conspiracy revolves around every single well-reputed news source in the world refusing to communicate the truth... Maybe check yourself.
If other people want to pay and be paid, that's fine, but for a lot of people in the open source sphere it leaves a bit of a bad taste.
Basically it becomes something very different once it's a product you're selling. I'm honestly not sure it's a good advice - your users will rightfully expect a lot more from you if they pay for the product, and you'll probably not make enough money for it to really make sense. So it'll be more work, more obligations, and monetary incentives won't be strong enough for it to make sense.
Encouraging users to make donations to cover the cost of operation, on the other hand, makes all the sense in the world.
Then again, if there's a method to it and logic behind it, maybe these active downvoters are doing everybody a favour by screening content and downvoting things they consider to be of little value?
I don't know. It would be interesting to hear their motivation for sure.
PieFed shows us that he has an "attitude" of -40%, which I guess means that of 200 catloaf votes 140 will point downwards. So I guess at least it's nothing personal, he or she is just an active downvoter of things. I guess we all enjoy spending our time differently.
A cool potential feature would be weighted downvotes - giving downvotes form users with higher attitude scores (in PieFed terms) greater significance. But I'm derailing.
It's a bit trickier to have a stable and efficient disinformation apparatus in place when you change governments every 4 years. Whatever is directly supported by the government would have to be supported by both the Trump and the Biden cabinets, or start from scratch every fourth year. The Kremlin doesn't have that problem.
Of course, the US military and certain other institutions tend to run their own side show. We all know the US was tapping phone lines in Berlin for decades, and there's little reason to believe they have fundamentally changed.
As a European, I'm just somewhat more worried about Russia at the moment, considering their support for the far right, successful effort to get Trump elected, the war in Ukraine, and all that. But by all means, I'm not naive to the US either, and I'm not sure why you would assume that I am.