Agreed. I have such a distrust at this point of any media that fits a particular format and style, and that whole instance checked a bunch of the boxes.

Like, as far as I know, “Drop Site News” and “In These Times” have not done a thing wrong, and still every time I see them I instantly think “What the fuck! Are you guys Russian? What are you up to?”

The majority of these people that are visible online are likely just literal teenagers trying to deep dive into concepts they have no foundational understanding of and glomming onto whatever sounds the best to their 14 year old, completely externally enforced, worldview.

I 100% agree with this. I was actually confused for a long time by how people on Lemmy.ml are so universal about using the same types of bad thought patterns and arguments… they came across as genuine, individual people, not like some of the propaganda accounts that all employ the same lazy dishonest methods because they are literally just reading from the same handbook. But certain ways of looking at things and flaws in their critical thinking, all the .ml people just happen to share (or it happens to be really common for users there). It was really odd and I couldn’t understand it.

I have reached a tentative conclusion that maybe they just tend to be young or be really unfamiliar with reading critically or being rigorous about judging an argument… and that is why they are still comfortable on .ml. I think it is self-selecting. They wouldn’t be there if they weren’t taken in by certain types of failed logic, because that is the logic that is enforced from above over there.

I’m still not 100% sure but it kind of seems to me like that is what is going on.

Pointing out this stuff like this post does, showing how information warfare gets injected into discourse and hidden as real journalism, is the exact thing that causes this discordant worldview to stop holding weight. The more exposure this gets the less likely people will just take some report and form an opinion completely unaware that opinion is the manufactured outcome of the organization publishing that report.

Completely agree with this also. I don’t think deleting or blocking this stuff is the answer, because that will always be a temporary solution. I think vigorously pushing back on it is the answer for exactly the reason that you said.

Lies in public discourse isn’t anywhere near a new problem, and humans do have methods to deal with it. It just takes time and it takes a sensible community where some of the tools that can give traction to the truth can get some leverage.

So long as people are willing to care for one another and stand up against injustice they are not my enemy. Learn to identify and counteract the actual bad actors with information so that anyone who mistakenly comes across their viewpoint is immediately greeted by a counterpoint from a real person with a conscience.

Yeah. Even Trump voters, I don’t really think are “the enemy.” Self defense is fine, they can be deadly dangerous in the short run. But in the long run they are more than anything victims of that same powerful machine, and the way to save ourselves will be to save them from it, too, so we can all survive together.

But then where will I deploy my AI moderator?

Yeah. I’ve started to get suspicious of people who go out of their way to tell you that they are bold leftist media, and they’re bringing a needed perspective that is super-vital and not just all propaganda and lies like everything else is. It sort of reminds me of those bank billboards that say, “To us, you’re more than just a number.”

Update: It looks to me at least pretty likely that !altmedia@altmedia.house is also Russian propaganda. Maybe they just wanted to post this thing, and are short of any of the critical thinking skills that would let them evaluate my argument that MPN is Russian when I told them it was. Mostly they seem to be posting pro-Palestinian stuff from reliable sources. But, the sidebar is super sus to me.

Until January 2nd, 2025 the 'WorldNews` subreddit, with 40 million users automatically subscribed, had an ‘Israel at War’ livethread constantly at the top.

This community was founded to dissent from this forced perspective, and present the Palestinian and anti-establishment position in general.

Fine. I actually completely agree with this, I took a quick look at some of the pinned /r/worldnews threads about Israel’s wars and “wars” and they’re completely full of pro-Israel bullshit. My initial assumption is that the inherent corruptibility of the Reddit / Lemmy moderation model has rendered /r/worldnews subject to propaganda from Israel, but who knows. But yes it’s some bullshit.

https://www.reddit.com/r/worldnews/comments/1h3nk2e/rworldnews_live_thread_israel_at_war_thread_79/

It’s a little bit weird that they are pretending that anything on Lemmy needs to have this pro-Palestinian iconoclasty brought to bear, when everyone on Lemmy is pro-Palestinian anyway, but sure, whatever. Anyway, reading further:

This community is ‘AltMedia’ in the Mearsheimer and Walt sense. Not the Richard Spencer sense.

Not sure why those are the only two options…

And then below that is where it goes off the rails.

This community likes

John Mearsheimer

Good stuff if a little bit of an odd choice for the number 1.

Edward Said, Noam Chomsky

Great stuff

Chris Hedges

Well that’s an odd choice. All I really know about the guy is some email list that gets sent to me that has his name on it which occasionally says some very bizarre stuff. For example “The internet, from its inception, was created to be a tool of mass surveillance. It was developed first as a counterinsurgency tool for the Vietnam War and the rest of the Global South, but like many devices of foreign policy naturally it made its way back to U.S. soil.” He apparently used to be an extremely bold anti-Iraq War voice back in those days, which is obviously fantastic, but since then…

Hedges began hosting the television show On Contact for the Russian-government owned network RT America in June 2016. Hedges, who has claimed not to have known much about the network at the time, was approached to make a show by RT America president Mikhail “Misha” Solodovnikov, who promised him complete editorial independence.[44][57]

On Contact provided commentary on social issues, often profiling nonfiction authors and their recently published works, with Hedges aiming to follow the approach of former public television shows. On Contact was nominated for an Emmy in 2017, RT America’s first significant award nomination, but the award was won by Steve.[44]

On March 3, 2022, RT America ceased operations following the widespread deplatforming of Russian-sponsored media caused by the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine.[44] The run of On Contact ended.

Hedges supported Green Party candidate Jill Stein in the 2016 election.[44]

On May 27, 2020, Hedges announced that he would run as a Green Party candidate in New Jersey’s 12th congressional district for the 2020 elections. After being informed the following day that running for office would conflict with FCC fairness doctrine rules because he was at that time hosting the nationally broadcast RT America television show On Contact, Hedges decided not to pursue office in order to keep hosting the show.[63][64]

Anyway. Back to the list:

Scott Ritter, Glenn Greenwald, Tucker Carlson

I don’t recognize all that many of the names on their list. But, the people that they “like” that I do recognize that are in any way active in the modern day, there is a very distinct through-line (pretty much universal) about how those people feel about the invasion of Ukraine.

Anyway, YSK.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aGSKrC7dGcY

What the fuck

TIL. I’m so confused by this concept.

https://www.reddit.com/r/Anarchy101/comments/142zr10/what_does_critical_support_mean_in_leftist_spheres/

What level in school did these guys reach that this idea needs a special word for it? Like yes, of course you are allowed to support one action or portion of something but still be critical of the bad stuff, or of that thing as a whole. That’s… that’s how it works. If you’re not some kind of “YAAAAAY MY COUNTRY hooray forever” idiot, then that should be how you look at everything. You decide whether something that’s happening is good or bad, and then you express your support or not accordingly. This whole thing where it is relevant in any respect “which side” is doing the good or bad thing, in order for it to be good or bad or whether and how we need to talk about it, is some State Department bullshit that has no place in a normal person’s brain.

Do they imagine that there are a lot of people who go around uncritically supporting Ukraine / Democrats / NATO / whatever, just because they decided to like them? And that they need to distinguish that their support for their causes is the other kind? I kind of agree with the person who said that in practice it seems to boil down to “Fuck Putin, but Ukraine should just roll over and stop fighting” more often than not. I don’t really know, but that is the only way that to read this that makes sense to me, the on-the-surface reading seems just bizarre and pointless.

There are already .ml people in here, whataboutisming hard.

Yeah. In retrospect, it’s easy to pick out what stuff is just Elon Musk making up bullshit because it would be awesome. And, with the cybertruck, he finally got to inject that into the engineering process as a dominant factor as he’d been trying to do for so long with the cars. And look at the result…

Back before people knew all that much about it, back when Elon Musk was the guy who made Tesla and SpaceX and this super smart guy (as opposed to being the guy who bought them and then fucked up the engineering), I knew some people who were excited about it. It was supposed to be a working truck but electric, bring all the better-than-other-cars stuff that the Roadster and Model S had, it was supposed to have solar panels and electrical outlets and super-strong construction so you could use it to survive the zombie apocalypse.

I think that was before the inflection point, back when the genuine success Tesla had had made Musk’s personal brand of bullshit believable. I remember when people started getting a good look at all the concept and actual prototypes, that made it look like a dumpster without the storage space, was when the shine came off the rose. But I definitely do remember people who were excited about it back in the beginning.

See my other comment. I wasn’t saying at all that Lemmy was a US-only thing, I was just trying to say that that the whole network is probably enough of a niche platform that it’s not worth the substantial effort that would be involved in trying to interfere too much with US users on non-US instances. Big instances in the US, they can fuck with, and so why not (and especially since the Take it Down act is structured to empower individuals to go after them without the government needing to spend resources on it.) Instances outside the US, never mind, we have bigger fish to fry.

Oh, I am sure most of Lemmy is outside the US. I was saying that, in general, Lemmy (and even Mastodon) is probably too small and difficult a problem for them to want to attack through any systematic method. I think, if anything, they’ll just surveil and punish individual US-based users as opposed to trying to shut down or block instances outside the US.

It’s one of the advantages of ActivityPub services. Bluesky will be easy for them to attack at the root and I fully expect them to do so, whereas for truly federated services I think the reaction will be “ah what the hell too much trouble, how much harm can they really do.”

No, they will just make server operators liable for obeying any conservative who has an issue with any content there and can make the right format of complaint.

I suspect that instances outside the US will simply be too small a factor to bother with. Small, scattered opposition that is subject to deliberate trolling and disruption at any scale anyone feels like deploying will simply not be worth bothering with.

This is all assuming if a big internet-censorship operation starts (which it seems likely that it will). I think it will mainly focus on large based-in-the-US companies which host large services. Notably among them will be Bluesky. The only impact it will have on anything ActivityPub-based is that they will shut down or muzzle some big instances inside the US, and then, the point being made, they will probably move on, leaving instances outside the US to do whatever they want. That’s my prediction.

Oh, also, Palantir’s surveillance will incorporate people’s comments into their overall dossier on the person, regardless of where their instance is, which means that anyone who maintains a big presence on an ActivityPub network will be putting themselves at person risk of neo-deportation to somewhere they can never get free from. It will still be legal to do, though. Sure.

Are you saying I was being silly?

You might be onto something

Okay, so way back when, Google needed a way to install and administer 500 new instances of whatever web service they had going on without it being a nightmare. So they made a little tool to make it easier to spin up random new stuff easily and scriptably.

So then the whole rest of the world said “Hey Google’s doing that and they’re super smart, we should do that too.” So they did. They made Docker, and for some reason that involved Y Combinator giving someone millions of dollars for reasons I don’t really understand.

So anyway, once Docker existed, nobody except Google and maybe like 50 other tech companies actually needed to do anything that it was useful for (and 48 out of those 50 are too addled by layoffs and nepotism to actually use Borg / K8s/ Docker (don’t worry they’re all the the same thing) for its intended purpose.) They just use it so their tech leads can have conversations at conferences and lunches where they make it out like anyone who’s not using Docker must be an idiot, which is the primary purpose for technology as far as they’re concerned.

But anyway in the meantime a bunch of FOSS software authors said “Hey this is pretty convenient, if I put a setup script inside a Dockerfile I can literally put whatever crazy bullshit I want into it, like 20 times more than even the most certifiably insane person would ever put up with in a list of setup instructions, and also I can pull in 50 gigs of dependencies if I want to of which 2,421 have critical security vulnerabilities and no one will see because they’ll just hit the button and make it go.”

And so now everyone uses Docker and it’s a pain in the ass to make any edits to the configuration or setup and it’s all in this weird virtualized box, and the “from scratch” instructions are usually out of date.

The end

on the 50 communities here on lemmy he mods to silence discussion that doesn’t align with his views.

Who is he on Lemmy? I didn’t know he was here too. Do you have some examples of silencing discussion that doesn’t align with his views?

I’m aware of reports of him doing messed-up moderation on Reddit, which is sus. If it sounded like I was in his corner I am not. I’m just saying like you were that more clarity would be better.

Edit: There’s also this and this

Yeah. The instant I read “racist, anti-immigrant and anti-LGBTQ+ views in a position of power” I strongly suspected that this is some bullshit.

IDK man. I’ve heard bad things about carrotcypher before, I have not looked into them one way or another. It’s sort of dicey both ways: I’m paranoid enough to be wary of a moderator who seems right-wing or pro-corporate who seems to be abusing their position, and also paranoid enough to be wary of a sudden hue and cry that a particular moderator needs to be removed because they are “problematic” in poorly-specified ways.

Just taking a cursory look at it: Mike’s defense of carrotcypher seems pretty credible. He looked at all carrotcypher’s past moderation actions and decided that it all looked fine and explained why with details. The criticism seemed a little unhinged. The one link that I saw at a quick glance was a link to a single one-line reddit comment, saying that it called CNN propaganda when it didn’t, and saying he favored deporting Mahmoud Khalil when he didn’t.

Then there was a bunch of stuff like:

this is a wildly disgusting person that you welcome into your space. i know that as a trans woman i cannot trust any fosstodon user while knowing what kind of person you happily let on your staff, whether theyre acting on those beliefs or not. it’s not safe for our mostly queer userbase to talk to your fascist-harboring userbase.

It would have been much easier to just link to some of the messed-up things, instead of asserting them and getting all upset and using the “I’m queer so don’t you DARE argue with me or you will be a ‘problematic’ person too” card.

IDK, I’m not decided on carrotcypher specifically and he might be a big POS and I just haven’t seen it yet. I have seen arguments that he removed particular reddit posts that there was no legitimate reason to remove. I just wish there was more light and less heat about why exactly he is a problem. Basing it on “this is stuff he removed that he shouldn’t have, look, links” is way better, in my opinion, than just being loudly upset about it.

Removed by mod

Removed by mod

Are you comfortable running a little python script to do it? I’ve done something like this for myself for exactly the same reason, I could polish it up and show you and you could use it locally for yourself.