Like when people say nationstates and corporations are astroturfing lemmy, I'm sure bruh, manipulating all those thousands of people will have dire geopolitical outcomes.

[–] pop@lemmy.ml 4 points 2 months ago (1 children)

This is the same ignorant shit as "I don't mind surveillance, because i've got nothing to hide."

Marketing agencies and the likes actually like new platforms as they rarely have strict spam prevention mechanism and analytics to prevent astroturfing, multiple accounts, automation, proxies and everything relating to brigading.

Do you think automating some shit posting on an online forum costs a million dollar or something?

An intern could code a bot in an hour and add in to the already operating workflow. There are also ready-made products that just fill in forms and do social shit.

But sure bruh, no one's doing anything you don't know. You got it all figured out.

[–] MataVatnik@lemmy.world 2 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago)

I didn't qualify my comment because I was just shit talking but seeing you're passionate about the subject let me further share some of my opinions.

I actually do believe that a place like lemmy could be used as testing grounds before bigger campaigns. I know this because I saw the first instances of Russian propaganda and Russian trolls in LiveLeak back in 2008. I see now a lot of the same strategies and talking points that they were employing a decade and a half ago. It feels as if liveleak was a sandbox where they honed a lot of their strategies before taking it to a wider audience.

That being said, I saw people crying about astroturfing on Lemmy because they were salty about something, when their clearly wasn't anything going on. Also, having dealt with it for decades I think it's pretty easy to pick up when trolls are present manipulating narratives. It's like seeing a bad actor in a play, you just knownthey are acting. And also, even as a sandbox I don't think there are armies of trolls dedicated to Lemmy. I can see maybe a handful of actors maybe coordinating. Hasbarah, who is clearly very active on Reddit, doesn't seem to have done much here on lemmy which would be fertile grounds for them. Same with the 50 Cent Army and Russian trolls.

[–] tfw_no_toiletpaper@lemmy.world 3 points 2 months ago

Yes a billboard would reach more consumers 😭

[–] BruceTwarzen@lemm.ee 1 points 2 months ago

It's still free advertising