I notice a large number of ragebait-y political communities being spun up by new users with thousands of posts & ai profile header photos. I notice comment sections are more acrimonious, and foreign disinfo talking points are circulating a lot more prolifically than before the US election started ramping up.
Anyone else notice this? Any idea on how to combat it on this platform? Are there any communities built around creating block lists of obvious troll/ai/disinfo accounts & communities?
I’ve literally been downvoting nothing but random political posts outside of politics communities and still they somehow worm into the hot feed. Mods should take a more serious “no politics spam” rule.
At best, mods seem overwhelmed, especially of meme communities, while at worst, they are okay with such rule violations so long as they agree with the particular brand of politics. I had to start blocking some when they advocate extremist views that I don’t find fun to constantly read. This was long before the election ramp-up - like “wouldn’t it be fun to skin a landlord alive?”, “the only good landlord is a dead landlord”, etc.
But it worms its way into many other communities too, so finally I blocked all of lemmy.ml. Blocking lemmy.ml, lemmygrad.ml, and hexbear.net makes the Fediverse fun to be in, rather than a hellscape of extremist propaganda that constantly makes fun of the USA sponsored genocide, while defending genocide committed by Russia or China. I am okay with content regarding genocide, but I prefer a more… “adult” take on the matter, rather than the juvenile crap I was constantly seeing before those blocks.
They are free to speak however they want - but I am also free to not listen.
They should, but won’t. The Lemmy people (or at least devs) aren’t exactly apolitical, more’s the great big whopping pity. Also downvoting is unlikely to do shit, I would suggest blocking it. I moved to lose .ml, grad, hexbear, slrpnk immediately and this place is so much better for it.
What’s wrong with slrpnk? All the other ones I know enough to understand your reasoning
Most of the content I noticed from there was angry doomposting and news. They’re not at the same level as the blatantly malicious ones, I just don’t want to deal with that shit as having too much of it blared at me bums me out.
Did they just charge their username?
There seems to be a few people suddenly calling Biden racist too, and trying to say both parties are the same. If it quacks like a lobbyist, it is possibly a lobbyist…
But yeah. This is overall probably due to the election more than anything.
People like me (I’m Aussie) will even up vote some things simply because I can’t imagine how bad it would be for Trump to win again… For the entire world.
Hey, 🇺🇸’n here; I’m really fucking sorry that you worry about these childish political problems in a country you don’t even live in.
We’re still months out from the actual election date, so nothing is certain, but what is certain is that Donald Trump is not capable of changing his behaviour, or even actually listening to anything that goes against his rotten worldview. He is a demented track horse that is frothing and shitting everywhere (with a minority of stubborn racists betting on him) while the other track horse is making it look easy when her opponent makes himself look bad.
Its not an easy call quite yet, but if this progress continues as it is, its a near-certainty that orange man isn’t getting his hands on the launch codes. And by next election, I feel confident that he won’t get another chance.
Something tells me that you’re not at fault…
We have similar extremist dickheads here similar to trump (but Trump helps give them power too).
And yeah… It’s absolutely clear trump won’t change his behavior. That became clear after he had a second judgement filed against him for defamation by E Jean Carroll, and he can likely be sued a 3rd time successfully. He really is dumb as dog ****. Could have spent the rest of his life playing golf lying about his profitability. Instead he chose to offend half of the country, and draw attention to himself and his crimes by bragging
Everyone is being spammed with it. Tis the season
https://lemmy.world/u/UniversalMonk
One week old account. 684 Comments. 383 Posts. That’s 152 posts/comments a day, 9 an hour, and most are over a paragraph long. Almost all of them focus controversially on third-party advocacy in the middle of an election year.
Not saying this account is a bot, but a person would certainly have to be spending a whole lot of time on lemmy to be posting this much in one week so it certainly feels spamish.
There is another group of users asking basically the same question over in this thread:
https://lemmy.world/post/18757036
It’s definitely odd at a minimum.
That shitbag also got all my content pulled from /politics where I called him out as a shill, then the mods banned me despite me providing proof of his forum sliding tactics.
Face it, lemmy’s already been taken over by the bots and shills, they’ve infiltrated the mod teams and are now protecting their own. We all saw it happen with reddit and the admins just let it happen here to.
Getting so tired of assholes infiltrating online spaces.
The account isn’t a bot, they are a media management account that uses AI content but is ultimately just a person using tools to undermine free discussion.
haha I just saw an absolutely terrible post by that very real individual
Reminds me of the bot ban wave done just about a year ago. Maybe hosts will do the same again, or make account generation have a pending status.
I see that this account has a few topics it posts on. Now, that alone doesn’t mean anything. Lots of lemmy users have their 3, 4 topics they are interested in and nothing more. Maybe they are an enthusiastic green party voter.
But that amount of posts in such a short timespan smells like a bot account.
Its the american elections. I just ban these communities
Yeah, you have much more important matters to attend to, like copulating with predatorial fish
I have blocked all the sublemmys that are doing it
Uhh… a major party us presidential candidate was shot and the other one dropped out and anointed his controversial vp.
I haven’t been out here advocating third party voting for a tick now because there isn’t a serious line to compare against for either major party since those events.
If you don’t wanna see political stuff in an American election year then stop using all/active.
Absolutely, I had to immediately block the politics sublemmy. I noticed this change instantly as I always browse all. Suddenly my front-page was 95% politics posts. As if someone had flipped a lever.
I don’t know what you guys are talking about. It seems to me there’s always been this many political posts here. Maybe there’s been a slight uptick for the election but it’s not much different than it has been for the entire year I’ve been around.
If you, a potential voter, are reading something, then people trying to win an election will try to put information that will influence your opinion into those sources you are reading.
It’s been bad for a bit with the tankies here taking every opportunity to make some variant of “genocide Joe” comments but refusing to discuss any of the choices we had and the result of those choices.
They got super-quiet when Biden dropped out. Vanished.
Now we’re getting what appears to be a new wave.
They had to workshop new prompts
It always takes them a bit of time to pivot talking points. I imagine that whenever a pivot is needed, there’s a bunch of drunk higher up russians having meetings to come up with new ideas, then all those ideas get thrown out there to test them, they measure clicks and responses to figure out what works and once they find something that sticks well enough, the frontline trolls will receive the new talking points and playbooks.
We’ve all see some vile attacks against Walz and especially Harris recently. But unfortunately for Trump and his foreign supporters, drunk macho fascists coming up with ideas to attack the character of a non Caucasian woman, does not produce ideas that resonate well with the democratic left. So they were unable to find something new that had enough zing and they went back to their golden classics of pushing a 3rd party and the “both sides” argument, for now anyhow.
I haven’t really noticed much, but that’s because I’ve taken to blocking political communities once they start bothering me by putting too many article links in the front page or being generally rageful.
I’d love to but where are you getting regular news (and please without ‘Elon musk might maybe sell stocks in tesla’ “news” and likewise) ?
Blocking half this site has made it significantly more pleasant.
I don’t follow [email protected], but stuff like [email protected] and similar have been pretty political.
But on the other hand, it’s not due to a downvoting campaign against non-political stuff or anything. It’s just because users there aren’t actually submitting much non-political news. I mean, I’m not really enthusiastic about ragebait and such, but on the other hand, I can’t exactly yell at someone for submitting something other than what I want to look at. The problem is just that there aren’t enough people out there submitting stuff that I do want to see at the moment.
I mean, the real issue is that users need to do a certain amount of submitting and/or commenting to generate interesting stuff for others to read. The ratio drops as the size of a community increases; if communities are small, there has to be a higher ratio of content creation for the community to be viable.
It doesn’t take a very high ratio if you have thousands of people in a community, but it’s still larger on the Threadiverse, in 2024, than it is on, say, Reddit.
I mean it’s in /asklemmy too. I suggested voting for Kamala a few days ago is better than Trump if we want to move closer to universal healthcare and apparently I’m a murderer of 70000 people because of a pragmatic view of voting for her is better than Trump.
It was so quiet and nice a few weeks ago when everyone agreed for a short period Kamala was decent. Now the disinformation campaign has restarted, supporting her is supporting the “neo-liberal/pro-corporate agenda”. So bloody tired of conservative/Russian bots.
Oh, you support a mainstream candidate, huh? What else, do you like eating babies? Why don’t you just admit you’re evil incarnate and vote for my favored candidate instead?
First time?
Don’t worry, day after the election they mysteriously vanish as if they were never real at all.
Like when Biden stepped out of the election. The scripts were broken and there was only silence
Nope, keyword filters help
I have Elon and Musk entered individually to catch all that shit too.
I wish they worked on pictures too :( half my feed is still full of stuff I’ve blocked just because they didn’t use the word in the title
OCR is easy enough now that I’m a little surprised text isn’t auto-parsed from uploaded images
Hmm.
Having a bot that auto-OCRs images and comments with the text in the image – and, even better, a AI-generated description, maybe – would probably help vision-impaired users.
I mean, it’d be technically more-efficient to have a bot run it as a one-off than to have every impaired-vision user run it.
I was actually just looking at a software package that did something like that (for the purpose of removing text from AI-generated images…it’d run text recognition on the image, identify text areas, then automatically inpaint the identified region, repeating until the text was gone).
https://github.com/iuliaturc/detextify
So I know that the underlying software is out there.
Add harris
is that a lemmy feature?
Don’t think so yet? Using a 3rd party app for android, sync
Should add Harris, Walz, and Vance.
I thought it has always been like that?
Lemmy APIs are free of charge, so spamming stuff here makes sense from a financial viewpoint. It also makes it trivial to ingest the data for GenAI use.
