this post was submitted on 13 Feb 2026
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2 day account advocating for censorship. Hmmm very convincing.
To be fair, no one is wasting energy, time, or money creating bots to argue with the 15 other people here on Activity Pub.
They absolutely are. Astro-turfing is a well established and effective practice.
In places with a real audience, sure. I'm not convinced it happens to any meaningful degree here.
It does. Source: The fucking reports screen every time I log in and my instance isn't even large.
Got a few examples?
In spaces that tend to run leftist where the number of people required to stir shit is infinitely smaller than somewhere like reddit or Facebook? Why? All they have to do is show up and say something stupid and 100 people will parrot them here and on more prominent social media.
They literally get more bang for their buck doing it here.
Because having an insignificantly small group of people stirred up provides an insignificant advantage.
Also much more information about the people posting is publically available here than any corporate owned platform.
Do you have any actual, credible evidence of astroturfing on ActivityPub?
I strongly disagree. Disrupting niche communities on the edge of the left and propagating harmful narratives is an incredibly effective strategy. Look at all the people who were on here around the elections in 2024 encouraging people not to vote. Given how many people echoed that sentiment, it seems like it was pretty effective.
Honestly, believe it or don't. I don't really care. I'm not about to make a concerted effort to convince you. It's not a thesis. To me it seems pretty self-evident that what we know is happening on larger social media would also be happening here, where there's a much juicer target. Also, like, the effort they put in isn't exactly stellar. Ducks quack.
That was being spread on the major platforms as well. And those messages were coming from server admins here too -- are you suggesting db0 is a psyop?
There's no evidence that any action on ActivityPub translates to meaningful results in that election.
I know you feel like it's true, and you're welcome to feel that way.
Useful idiots abound on social media, including Lemmy. Every user who echoes astro-turfing doesn't need to be a paid actor. That's the whole reason anyone does it anywhere.
Again, you're welcome to follow your feelings.
Prove it by finding a user that you think is a bot. Show me a bot user.
Nah I'm good.
You are, in fact, no good.
You think they would waste their time here when Facebook is right there and has millions upon millions more users?
What's the signal to noise ratio on Facebook? Do you know how to reliably get a message out to your followers that won't get diverted because of the algorithm?
Now what about Lemmy?
Found the bot that was programmed to argue bad points.
Fair. I'm an addict.
But you still didn't respond to the criticism that there are no other better ideas offered to protect children online.
Because, as it turns out, "protecting the children" is a catchy slogan used to justify censorship and outright harmful bills, just like "antiterrorism."
Instead of fixating on protecting children, look into what these lawmakers think the children need to be protected from.
First, don't need to respond to arguments made in bad faith. There's no net positive outcome possible for the other person who is coming to the conversation in good faith.
Second, not having their own solution does not invalidate anything critical they say about the one under discussion. There doesn't have to be a "better" solution to justify not implementing something that has no positive impact on the targeted problem and severe negative impacts elsewhere.
How will an adult offering up their photo identification protect children? Let's say I'm a pedophile who's targeting children. Will I upload a video of my face or Government ID to prey on children on Discord, or will I pretend to be younger and not identify myself? Your argument makes no sense. Also, what are you talking about being an addict for? It's completely irrelevant here.
Isn't the entire point to "protect" the children from "being corrupted" by that evil porn and other adult content? It's not about protecting them from pedophiles, it's about keeping them nice and innocent so it's even easier for the pedophiles to groom them.
I'm only going to explain this once because this topic, as well as most online topics, is more about emotions than facts. But here we are.
You didn't understand how this helps because you aren't trained to think like a child predator. (That's fine.) I've had to take a lot of child safety trainings over the years for professional reasons. Here's how online child predators work, they start by trying to get the kid into a secret. They say "hey want to see some porn?", and of course the kid is curious. And the kid is told, "be sure you don't tell your parents about this." Then they slowly try to pull into deeper and deeper secrets and start to black mail the kid. They start to demand that the kid send them nude photos. They trap the kids into deeper and deeper secrets and guilt to get more and more out of them. In the worst cases this results in meetups with the predator in person.
The easiest places for the predators to start this process is porn sites where the kids are visiting in secret to begin with. Those are the kids that are most vulnerable.
How how did this protect kids? The goal is to keep the kids out of spaces where they would be targeted to begin with.
So there you go. I'm all ears for how to do this better.
And this is going to be stopped by giving Discord your ID?
Some of them, yes.
You see, one thing that child predators really really hate is policies. They want their interactions to be frictionless, so that at the first sign of trouble they can get out. Strong policies really are a strong deterrent.
It won't make the evil people stop doing the evil things, but it'll cause a lot of them to move to someone else's platform that has weaker policies.
if you're fine with putting up with the bullshit, that's your business, but everyone who's saying fuck that shit are correct.