• Carmakazi@lemmy.world
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    1 month ago

    Because the big players there are not serious idealogues, they are paid a paltry sum through private channels to constantly spread Russian and Chinese disinformation in their larger psyop campaign against the West.

    • LibertyLizard@slrpnk.net
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      1 month ago

      Highly doubtful. The amount of time, money, and effort would be much better spent elsewhere. Lemmy’s audience is very small.

      • PugJesus@lemmy.world
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        1 month ago

        Yeah, more likely the actors on Lemmy are just useful idiots parroting propaganda points they’ve heard elsewhere.

      • Carmakazi@lemmy.world
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        1 month ago

        Time

        Basically none on the part of the handlers. Often this arrangement is handled by a private firm that doesn’t necessarily have to be Russian or Chinese, I have heard of one operating in Australia. The posters themselves are spending a lot of time, but they’re the ones selling it.

        Money

        Again, they’re not exactly paying these guys a living wage, and even if they were, it’s peanut crumbs for state-level actors.

        Effort

        A lot of people say that Lemmy is not worth the effort to demoralize because it’s too small, I say the effort is too small to not be worth the investment. I would even say that Lemmy users are self-selected for radicalization in some ways, broadly speaking they are fed up with corporate social media and corporatism in general.

        It’s also a somewhat important step to have a place they can speak unfiltered amongst themselves, no matter how small the clubhouse is. That’s where the real funky shit happens.

        • LibertyLizard@slrpnk.net
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          1 month ago

          I doubt those people are even aware of Lemmy, let alone hiring teams of people to post here. But regardless of how plausible it is, this is just speculation with no evidence behind it.

          That which is asserted without evidence can be dismissed without evidence.

          • Jiggle_Physics@lemmy.world
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            1 month ago

            commercial and propaganda bots have a tendency of taking small fora, and other sites with the ability to post, offline, as they overwhelm these super tiny venues, once their automated scrapers find them. There doesn’t have to be a team of people doing something other than monitoring bots.

            Also, I doubt anyone gets exposed to lemmy alone. It is very reasonable to believe many spend time on places worth using actual people to tailor their messaging to, and then carry that over here, and anywhere else they go. Point being, there no place so small that it becomes void of this.

            • LibertyLizard@slrpnk.net
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              1 month ago

              Most of the users people are complaining about are very obviously not bots though. After investigating and interacting with them, I’ve universally found that they’re just weird, terminally online people with extreme views.

              Actually, an offline friend of mine was recently accused of being an online shill. I’ve been pretty skeptical of these claims for a while but having a case with definitive proof has lost me all patience for these types of accusations. There’s just no point in accusing people like this unless you have actual proof. Most people are very very bad at distinguishing real users from propaganda.

              • Jiggle_Physics@lemmy.world
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                1 month ago

                Oh, I am not trying to say these particular people are bots, I am just pointing out that lemmy is not free of bots due to its size, also that there people are not solely on lemmy, so they are likely getting propaganda , in bot farm form, elsewhere, be it the US, Russia, China, EU, Exxon, whatever.

      • mlg@lemmy.world
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        1 month ago

        A whopping two downvotes, yeah I’m sure the paid social media spam targets the 17k active users on lemmy.world and not the billions of users on Facebook

          • ayyy@sh.itjust.works
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            1 month ago

            It’s bedtime here now, nothing changed. Care to re-evaluate your conspiracy theories yet?

            • disguy_ovahea@lemmy.world
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              1 month ago

              The downvotes quadrupled while the upvotes failed to double. I think I’ll keep my theory a little longer.

              • mlg@lemmy.world
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                1 month ago

                71 to 6 lol

                Even though these countries do run media spam operations, they usually target specific events and communities with a wide reach.

                Most of the people you find here will be irl people with differing views, not paid shills to spam posts.

                Also by these countries, I mean every country does this. You usually don’t see US spam because they do it against Russia and China which means their spam will be in Russian, Chinese, etc.

                https://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/usa-covid-propaganda/

      • subversive_dev@lemmy.ml
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        1 month ago

        I can’t speak for the other Lefties on here but I’m a Western citizen and former proud Liberal persuaded by arguments on this very website