It's just basic economics. The amount of power and influence you can generate with a disinformation troll farm dramatically outweighs the cost. It's a high impact, low cost form of geopolitical influence. And it works incredibly well.
this post was submitted on 01 Oct 2024
498 points (97.7% liked)
Technology
71223 readers
3739 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related news or articles.
- Be excellent to each other!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, this includes using AI responses and summaries. To ask if your bot can be added please contact a mod.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
- Accounts 7 days and younger will have their posts automatically removed.
Approved Bots
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
It's like saying that bullets and knives being more convenient than bricks for killing people are basic economics.
Doesn't explain why those brownshirt types have guns and knives and kill people on the streets, while you don't have those, and the police doesn't shoot them, and more than that, they'd arrest you were you to do something to brownshirts.
What I wanted to take from this bad analogy is that the systems are designed for troll farms to work, and not vice versa. Social media are an instrument to impose governments' will upon population. There are things almost all governments converge on, so the upsides of such existing outweigh the downsides.
Our world is dangerous.
Yeah…. That shit is going on right here on lemmy. Some of them have even allowed to be come so popular, we know them by name.
Ozma, yogthos, tokenboomer, alcoholicorn... am I forgetting anyone?
.ml .ee
Is .ee one of the ones with bad rep? I picked it randomly.
It's not as bad as ml who actively filter content they don't like.
Starts with “L,” ends with “bann.”
Knew I was letting someone out. How non-inclusive of me lol
UniversalMonk potentially
Honesrly: tokenboomer likely is all those accounts as well.
You will notice that anytime you respond to boomer with disagreement, multiple accounts will begin flooding you, and they all brave in and out of the conversations as if they are the ones who said things said by others.
You wouldn't expect a paid professional to be so sloppy, but on the other hand, if he was good at his job, he wouldn't be working for Hamas.
I think Lemmy is so tiny that those named below truly are just utter idiots doing that work for free.
Someone always has to be king shit of whatever hill they're on.
I don't rule it out. The prior era of "reddit alternatives" in the Voat era was quickly overrun too even though they were very small. The key to the internet has always been first mover advantage. If they have enough power to manipulate the top sites, it would take very little to hedge bets on budding platforms. They risk losing their advantage if a replacement platform establishes itself without them. That's pretty much the whole history of modern tech. To actively seek and snuff out your competitors.
If it ain't broke, don't fix it.
I'm Soviet Russia, don't fix broke you!
And continues to do so. You've grown since 2013
The imperial core is so fragile and indoctrinated that troll farms are an existential threat.
They NEED shit like that to exist. Bullshit needs more bullshit to survive. This is why despite murdering countless people and endless campaigns funded by billions of dollars there are still leftist movements that won't die.
I'd love to debate politics with you but first tell me how many r's are in the word strawberry. (AI models are starting to get that answer correct now though)
I tried this with Gemini. Regardless of the number of rs in a word (zero to 3), it said two.
So ask it about a made up or misspelled word - "how many r's in the word strauburrry" or ask it something with no answer like "what word did I just type?". Anything other than, "you haven't typed anything yet" is wrong.
But it's a phrase you typed, the very one that contains the question, unless you ask by voice or in a picture
People complain about Russian troll factories, but hey, they are helping develop a reddit alternative so they can't be all that bad.