Is it just me, or does it feel like Lemmy is being hit with a wave of political spam?
Is it just me, or does it feel like Lemmy is being hit with a wave of political spam?
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?
The most powerful country in the world is a large disinformation piñata. You whack it with a few memes and poor decisions come out.
You can’t fault hostile intelligence for giving it a go, and there are a lot of hostile intelligence services.
You whack it with a few memes and poor decisions come out.
... ouch. ~sigh
Yeah, pretty much.
It's also by design.
The flaws are designed to be exploited by the rich and powerful.
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.
haha I just saw an absolutely terrible post by that very real individual
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.
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.
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.
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 subscribe to communities and only read what I'm interested in. So I didn't notice anything. But I know lots of people use Lemmy differently and read the "All" feed. That might be an entirely different perspective.
Yep, I'm the same as you. Didn't notice a damn thing, and was curious how I'd missed anything. When I saw it was happening through new communities I knew it was the All-feed people seeing this.
I get that the All-feed is useful and fun, but seeing random shit is kinda the "price of entry" no?
Unfortunately, it's not bullet proof solution. I still see multitude comments in technology communities about "it's capitalism (greed)". It's an uphill battle to block it all. You can't block whole instances like lemmy.world or lemmy.ml :-)
You can block them
I think that's a you problem. If you're too thin-skinned for the truth, I don't think there is a good way to engage with people on the internet. Especially technology is a field that's massively intertwined with money. In our current world, the largest and dominatig companies are about technology and selling ads. That's just the way it is. So when talking about facts and real-world issues with internet technology, this influence is bound to come up... I mean feel free to have your own opinion. Maybe it's also a cultural difference in our perspective on the world. I'm also a person who doesn't shy away from calling them out.
Tl;dr election year in the US. It's only going to get more intense until the actual election.
I think it's more and more prominent. People base their entire personality based on their political beliefs. Plus they are very active. Probably due to it being crazy around the world right now.
On one hand, I hate election years.
On the other hand, as The Economist once had a cartoon pointing out, it could be worse.
It's all about the longest running election campaign in the world. The US elections. I don't understand why it needs to be this long 😂. France, the UK, India (over a billion people!) can announce and complete elections quicker than the US.
I would love some more intelligent and nuanced spam filtering but, honestly, I don't think we'll get anything soon enough.
It'll get better in November, but then we'll get a wave of spam about stolen elections. And then better again in January when they finally finish the election game.
I don't understand why it needs to be this long
Money and ratings. Since money is free speech and the media is a receptical for infinite speech, they can engineer a multi year campaign to keep that money flowing in constantly. And making it contentious means more eyeballs on the story and even more money for the media orgs.
It never really ends in the US. News people actually watch is so hyper polarized that the past four years felt like an election year, and they just repost it all to social media. Honestly I get wrapped up in it too... and I hate it.
It's like nothing gets any clicks unless its slurring a party or candidate, virtue signaling or parroting some party line, or something like that.
Do other countries have laws forbidding campaigning before a certain time?
Denmark has yes. I believe its limited to a pretty short period of a month.
In a way people decide on what to vote, depending on what the parties have been active with in between elections. The campaigning mostly is about promoting that and pointing at what others have failed with
Never heard of that. In my country it's normal not to finish your term in office, so once an election is called, they don't want to plan them too far out. That takes care of it and you're not too long in between governments
Outside of the news and actual politics subs, the only political spam I see on the reg is posts like this complaining about political spam.
Few memes channels get some and comments are just vile.
If you’re in a meme group you’ve already resigned to waste the time rotting your brain, so, whatever you get is consistent.
Every 4 years.
Keep in mind that American elections are coming up and Americans think the internet is only about them. So we're not only being dragged into this by disinformation campaigns.
Americans think the internet is only about them
Do we though?
You might not. Many Americans might not. But the internet is annoyingly US-centric and can be frustrating to use as a non-American. A random example: Numerous times I've gone to sign up/purchase something and put "Canada" as the country and the "State" and "Zip code" boxes never changed. I have been denied purchases and registration several times because the website was coded to only accept US zip codes even if I change the country.
So many sites just assume everyone is American, speaking American English, and interested in American things.
Yeah unfortunately it's not primarily astroturfing... these people do it for free
Keep in mind that the US's population is comparable to all of Europe and we are bickering over one shared election while also being a bunch of loud jackasses. We don't even think about the rest of the internet while drowning it out.
Comparable not really. The EU has a population of 450 million compared to 350 million of the US. Europe itself has more than double at 750 million. Also, there are many more countries outside of Europe that have a lot of people that speak English online.
The world. Americans think the world is about them. Why do you think aliens always come to America? Why the "world series" of baseball or something features only American clubs? Why they have such an extensive military budget.
Haven't seen that. But I have seen some users who spend every moment of their lives posting to sway opinion on an issue of their choosing. And if I accurately assess them as Russian paid trolls, I get all my comments removed and I get banned. So that's awesome and fair. Their content stays up, protected by mods. What an awesome feeling.
Israel -Garza trolls/posters too
Edit Little bit ironic funny. In a thread about trolls the trolls come out
This attitude is insane to me. A fucking genocide is happening. Imagine this attitude during WW2 if we were spring the Nazis. "Look at all these Jewish troll posters. So many complaints about this Holocaust thing. Must be Russian agents. No idea why else they would care this much."
I've got "Am I taking crazy pills?" energy up in here lol.
cough Linkerbaan cough
They are the mods. Your reports go straight to them. That's how they know to ban you.
You should get banned for that. This isn't Reddit, go back if you want a hug box.
What the hell are you talking about?
Yeah we're all subject to the mind virus that is US general elections.
I hate the phrase mind virus.
Well, unfortunately it is indeed an infectious agent that hijacks the infected to manufacturer more of itself and cannot metabolize or reproduce without directly utilizing the machinery of a host AND its medium of transmission, metabolism, and reproduction is the mind, so "mind virus" definitively fits the bill.
But so do most memetic constructs.
Rather than block lists, just subscribe to the lemmy communities that interest you and don't subscribe to political/news communities. Then view lemmy through the "subscribed" feed rather than the "all" feed - no political posts - problem solved.
I trawl through All to find new communities though, and a short blocklist makes that much easier.
Doesn't help. Everything from the meme/joke/fun communities you'd expect people to use to tune out The Horrors™ to discussion about the ActivityPub standards (what little exists that doesn't conflate it with Just Lemmy or Just Mastodon) devolve to US politics in like two comments. For me at least this entire section of fedi is a US politics-radioactive one I try spending as little time as possible (that includes posting non-politics!)
I find myself having significantly more fun on the microblogging side of the fedi, ruining jokes to ground in like 4 minutes with my oomfs and making followup meta jokes about how jokes only last 4 minutes. People actually use content warnings to hide away The Horrors™ when they want to talk about it, which means filters actually work. (Things like alt text for images also helps with word filters!)
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.
Just blocked politics & news and my quality of life instantly jumped 200%. I highly recommend it. If something significant happens, you'll read about it in another community.
Lots of blocking to do. Trust me, you won’t miss it. Part of the fun here.
Filter out the names of the candidates and a couple of crazy billionaires and you can even keep the news subs.
Me too. I had been getting really agitated, and others too, but it became so obvious that it was foreign influence trolls. Blocked politics, but it's especially concerning because most people aren't going to block politics.
First time?
Don't worry, day after the election they mysteriously vanish as if they were never real at all.
Would be crazy if it were all just disinformation campaigns throwing shit at each other for 12 months.
Luckily no one's stupid enough to fall for all that.
Like when Biden stepped out of the election. The scripts were broken and there was only silence
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
What is not flooded with political spam these times? And I am afraid we have not seen nothing yet.
Nope, keyword filters help
is that a lemmy feature?
Don't think so yet? Using a 3rd party app for android, sync
I have Elon and Musk entered individually to catch all that shit too.
derp should have added those two a while ago
Should add Harris, Walz, and Vance.
Add harris
It's been nothing but politics and memes (often about politics) since the first day I joined. I can only imagine how bad it is without my content filters considering how bad it is even with them.
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.
The Lemmy equivalent of a "subreddit" is called a "community".
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 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?
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 can see where you're coming from. I already blocked the news because I come here for memes and don't like following the news anyways, but yeah, if you're looking for non-political news, I guess that can be rough.
Blocking half this site has made it significantly more pleasant.
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) ?
That's the neat part, I don't. If there's anything really important, it will leak into memes, or I'll hear it from family members, but I don't think I've ever heard a piece of news and thought "Oh, it's a good thing I know that now."
It is election year in the US, a very polarizing election with two high profile wars, any social media will be weaponized
I really wish there was a mainstream social media site Americans were forbidden from using, or at least a way to automatically block/hide them, and their petty little political turf wars from my feed, no matter how I sort.
Honestly, could be an interesting idea for an instance
Sadly the woeld has gotten so dependent on the results of that little turf war that it wouldn't matter.
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.
Not really, but I am from Europe so I don't subscribe to communities connected to US news or politics. Can you give some examples?
Communities like https://lemmy.world/c/independentmormonism, https://lemmy.world/c/independentcatholicism, https://lemmy.world/c/thirdpartynews, all created today, and modded by a 9 day old user account with 640 comments and 334 posts.
Lemmy is another form of social media, and bullshit that happens on social media will come here as more people come here. Your life will be much better if you make full use of blocklists and filtering.
Don't know if you know, but just a heads up for anyone unfamiliar, the proper formatting for linking communities is:
This helps users from other instances browse those communities without leaving their instance and prevents mobile apps from opening the browser. It also supports autofill when typing after the exclamation mark so you can't go wrong.
Yes. There's also been a spike of political commentors that seem normal until you engage with them, then they fire back with emotionally-charged nonsense full of contradictions.
Like others have said, it's an election year in the US. Sorry everyone from over here 😔
I can also confirm that political discourse is becoming less civil / productive. Or at least that's what the increasing amount of such reports I'm getting, is telling me.
Everyone is being spammed with it. Tis the season
Filtering the names of popular political figures is leaving me with much less political news and the stuff that remains I am much more likely to care about than the usual gossip about celebrities, I mean politicians.
Honestly just filtering out the words "Trump" and "Elon" would get rid of about 95% of it all.
Gotta hand it to the news SEO teams, they know what makes effective clickbait.
Yep, and i understand that im on a western instance so western politics is to be expected but it was getting too much that
Allpage is overwhelmed with politics to the point that i don't see posts that interest me anymore. So i just blocked political communities and also communities related to twitter. Now I interact more with the fediverse cause i actually get a chance to see things that i can relate to instead american politics.Lately it feels like the bots have found Lemmy
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.
lol ikr its like it's an election year for a majority of the users or something cmon i wish we could go back to the days when lemmy did not have political posts back in 2020
Absolutely. They spam their own subs which limits reporting options. The mods of the popular
subscommunities they spam don’t seem interested in doing anything unless a comment or post is an egregious/explicit/blatant violation of the rules.The smart thing to do would be to block them, but I am not a smart man; I feel obligated to downvote them.
The good news, I guess, is Lemmy is growing to a size where following the Local (or All) feed is becoming a challenge. The bad news is Lemmy is still much too small for niche communities to be viable.
That's true of every social media platform, everywhere, before an election. Most social media companies are US companies or frequently visited by americans, but you'll find the same shit happening on foreign platforms too.
Why? Because it works. A lot of people end up voting based entirely on what seems to be the trend, so if you flood their feeds with enough propaganda, they flip.
And people with extreme views don't care about that, it just makes them feel like they're not alone and thousands of other people share their views and reinforces their narrow view of the world. And they feel entitled to be platformed too, because in their eye, everyone's going crazy and the world is really about to end. Just like a religion. Religious people genuinely think you're going to hell, no matter how sane your argument because their beliefs are more important than reality, because God is reality to them.
Yes. If you want to actually combat them, the best way is to contact your admins.
I agree and if you want it to stop make sure this November you vote for Kodos for president. Do not vote Kang as he is a terd.
I haven't noticed it but I rarely look at the all communities feed instead of just my subscriptions. I do notice that a lot of users seem to be simply in the tank instead of maintaining healthy skepticism towards politicians. I also keep hearing "foreign disinfo" but that makes me chuckle. Of course it exists but it's not more potent than the domestic disinfo which is even more plentiful.
I also keep hearing "foreign disinfo" but that makes me chuckle. Of course it exists but it's not more potent than the domestic disinfo which is even more plentiful.
I’m not sure the distinction is easy to make, or all that meaningful.
I’m not sure the distinction is easy to make, or all that meaningful.
I'm not who you replied to, but I think the implication is that the domestic disinfo is often just the plentiful pool of misinformed or so-called "low information voters" who may be pushing an agenda, but not one that goes beyond their own beliefs, whereas foreign actors are pushing a state agenda.
Its the american elections. I just ban these communities
Yeah, you have much more important matters to attend to, like copulating with predatorial fish
Be real careful calling out or reporting a bot/troll. Some weak ass mods around that will ban you for either even though they say to report the mod...
I have blocked all the sublemmys that are doing it
Thunder, the app I use on android, has a keyword filter so I don't see that junk.
Edit: I keep informed via rss. Lemmy is for fun so politics get filtered.
You must might want to check out [email protected]. I started it recently to help people identify and report disinformation on the platform.
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.
Consider using one of the Lemmy apps that supports key word filters.
Filter out the names of the parties and vice/prez hopefuls and you'll cut 90% of it from your feed.
Blocking communities you're not interested in is also helpful if you visit All. It's an uphill battle - I've blocked over 600 (sports and yiff porn probably account for 500 of those... jfc...) and still need to do some pruning, but my All is pretty personalized now.
From what I've seen 99% of coffee points comes from one instance, you could just block that instance.
It's more of a permanent flooding situation, but, well, election year. I just block shit that gets to be a nuisance - some instances are entirely devoted to shrill screeching, some have legitimately decent communities that just aren't worth the astroturfing/doomposting/negativity/politics/malicious management/people being twats or 100 other reasons. None of it's missed, except it shows how much of a ghost town this is when you remove the ragebait.
I lost my (several pages long) blocklist in the kbin.run disappearance, Lemmy actually having instance blocking does a lot to make it easier to build back up. I do wish blocking an instance also blocked its users, which doesn't seem like the case.
Its election season boyos. You cant escape it, even in your fediverse hidey hole.
If you only look at your subscribed communities you'll see much less of it.
Since Lemmy is an open source platform it is incredibly easy to build automated bots to spam it. I suggest looking for quality user Profiles to follow, and see what communities they posted on to find high quality communities.
Did they just charge their username?
Not the few communities I follow. Also I only read my Subscribed timeline.
I would love for a way to only see pictures if I click them, though.
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.
Just because you disagree with it does not make it spam.
If anything your post history looks like a spammer/troll.
Shit like this is why I wish instance blocking dealt with users, too
