I started going back through the database, trying to put together a little collection of quotes from people that were saying pre-election that Biden was basically a carbon copy of Trump, on immigration, and using it as a reason not to support Biden.
I was going to tag them, and quote what they said back to them, and ask now what was up with that. Honestly I just kind of lost my stomach for the whole operation after a pretty short time. A lot of the people evaporated between then and now. A lot of what they had to say was just endlessly repeating technically-true context free statements like “Biden deported more people than Trump” instead of explicitly stating the argument that Biden was just as bad. And what’s the point? Hopefully, we’re aware by now that the people who were slinging well-intentioned left sourced criticism why they couldn’t possibly stomach voting for a Democrat, were helping to create the nightmare we’re currently at the very beginning of, and that they were wrong.
A lot of the people evaporated between then and now. A lot of what they had to say was just endlessly repeating technically-true context free statements like “Biden deported more people than Trump” instead of explicitly stating the argument that Biden was just as bad. And what’s the point?
Yep. I banned soooo many “concern troll” / agenda posting accounts like that. Wish more instances would have done that (not that I think Lemmy had that much of an impact on the election, but just a general kind of thing).
It’s incredibly easy to spot these accounts by just clicking their username and looking at their one-track histories. Even the most ardent online activist (which would be a potential false positive here) takes the occasional break and engages in other interests or cracks a joke or two.
And many of those accounts were boosted by vote manipulation accounts. Right now, community mods can technically see votes in their communities, but Lemmy-UI doesn’t have that exposed to them. I think only Tesseract has that capability at the moment. But that’s definitely something mods need to be aware of.
Hopefully we’ve learned something from this past election re: sockpuppet agenda accounts.
Yep. I banned soooo many “concern troll” / agenda posting accounts like that. Wish more instances would have done that (not that I think Lemmy had that much of an impact on the election, but just a general kind of thing).
Yeah. We saw one head of the hydra, the one that was optimized to appeal to people who care about Gaza and immigration, but it was only the one. Other voters saw other messaging that wouldn’t have worked at all on Lemmy people. The point is not that Lemmy had any impact, it is that the hydra is a bad and significant thing.
It blows my mind that Lemmy admins don’t seem to grasp that this is a problem. Every election-related comments section was and still is filled with obviously engineered-for-a-purpose bullshit, and they’re like “ho hum doo doo doo well I guess everyone can say what they like, free speech ya know, please be civil.” It’s not that the Nazi at the table in the back is breaking any of the “rules” of the lunchroom. It’s that he is a Nazi. Fuck him. He needs to get out.
I don’t disagree, but it’s not quite as easy as that especially for admins of a large instance. It’s just a lot of voices, some legitimate, some part of a hydra campaign, and others legitimate but only spouting the hydra narrative because they heard it so much and bought into it (forgive the term, but “useful idiots”).
For as many as I banned myself (I run a small instance), I probably let 10 slide because I couldn’t prove they were one of the hydra heads.
My instance is small enough to fly under the radar, but for larger instances, the hydra heads will absolutely flood the YePowerTrippingBastards-esque communities and screech they’re being censored, [Big instance] is censoring [blank], [Big instance] wants genocide, etc in an attempt to spread their message via a corrupted version of the Streisand Effect.
TL;DR is it’s an easy game for the bad actors to play and a very unlevel playing field for everyone else. I wish there were an easy answer, but there really isn’t. The only way I’ve found to combat it on my own instance is to just disallow “agenda posting” (which I realize is a very blunt instrument, but it’s the best I can do given the platform limitations).
Yeah, agreed on all counts. I’ve seen them trying to manipulate the mod teams to do their bidding, and I sort of suspect that the campaign against FlyingSquid happened because he was taking action against the misinformation and they don’t like that and want to bully him out so they’ll have less resistance in the future.
They did the same to Jordan Lund in politics as they did to squid in Word news. So yeah, most likely.
Did they? What happened? I didn’t hear about this. politics@LW was so bizarre and useless that I gave up on it a while back.
I feel like Jordan could be pressured into doing things the way someone was pressuring him to do them, and so they tried to pressure him, while FS would argue for what he thought was right, and so they tried to get rid of him completely. And I think on both counts they’ve been succeeding pretty well.
It’s been a while, but the troll in question was spamming Jordan’s avatar image all over the place with a lot of unflattering (and false) accusations (I’ll just leave it at that).
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Most Latinos and legal immigrants who became citizens voted for this, they deserve everything they voted for because they are dipshits. Fuck them.
Absolutely not. Most Latinos and legal immigrants voted for the mirage of Trump that they saw on their social media, an incredibly well-engineered campaign of trickery that formed the only picture of reality that they were exposed to. It told him that Biden’s ICE was committing atrocities (they were), that Trump was a wealthy successful man who wasn’t part of the Washington elite that had been abusing them for however many generations, and that voting for him was a good way to stand up for traditional values.
It’s not, in my opinion, their fault that they were suckered by it. It’s like the Boy Scouts playing against the US military. You can’t hold people responsible for failing to overcome a set of propaganda that’s been invested in on the scale of the space program. You can try to fix the systems, and in the meantime give them some sympathy, because they’re fucked bad now, and no mistake.
Could say the same for anyone couldn’t you tho. Pretty sure even Elon has been radicalised by his own For You feed the thick cunt
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Let’s not use slurs or racist comments. I’m giving you a time out.
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I don’t see where the article you linked says that?
Vice President Kamala Harris finished with a slim majority of support from Hispanic voters, at 53%
