this post was submitted on 29 Jan 2025
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Fediverse vs Disinformation

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Pointing out, debunking, and spreading awareness about state- and company-sponsored astroturfing on Lemmy and elsewhere. This includes social media manipulation, propaganda, and disinformation campaigns, among others.

Propaganda and disinformation are a big problem on the internet, and the Fediverse is no exception.

What's the difference between misinformation and disinformation? The inadvertent spread of false information is misinformation. Disinformation is the intentional spread of falsehoods.

By equipping yourself with knowledge of current disinformation campaigns by state actors, corporations and their cheerleaders, you will be better able to identify, report and (hopefully) remove content matching known disinformation campaigns.


Community rules

Same as instance rules, plus:

  1. No disinformation
  2. Posts must be relevant to the topic of astroturfing, propaganda and/or disinformation

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This evening my uncle messaged me to let me know that Moms Across America commissioned testing that found glyphosate and heavy metal contamination in Girl Scout cookies. To be fair, he did just buy some from my kid (no refunds!) and I understand the concern about food contamination, but something is off. What's the deal with Moms Across America? Why is their CEO a vaccine skeptic hoping to get hired by RFK Jr.? It seems like an organic food/anti-vax lobbying organization, but I wonder if there's more to it than that. Is she just that effective as an individual mom influencer?

Edit: the screenshot isn't uploading correctly, so I changed it to a link to the Pixelfed post I originally made.

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[โ€“] [email protected] 11 points 1 day ago (1 children)

My bias makes me immediately think that anything they're claiming should be considered suspect.

Frankly, if an antivaxxer told me the sky was blue, I'd go outside to check.

This is a case where you should find a second or third source making the same claims, as well as a better source that says how much and specifically what was found in the cookies because it's entirely possible to have dangerous things in something but at levels that are not actually dangerous, and I see no specific units being claimed anywhere.

And I mean, glyphosphate is something we've sprayed on every inch of the globe at this point anyways and is on every single thing you're going to eat, so sure, it's bad, but it's only bad at certain concentrations. (It's Roundup)

[โ€“] [email protected] 3 points 1 day ago

Here's MAA's article about the findings. It does include numbers, but offers no comparison to similar treats on the market. For contrast, this Consumer Reports article addresses lead contamination in Lunchables type products from several manufacturers and does a decent job explaining what their findings mean. The CR article references California's daily read consumption limit, which I think properly relevant for foods, but the MAA article references the EPA limit for lead in water. I can probably do the math to better understand MAA's findings, but I have a feeling that they're presenting them this way in order to make them seem more alarming.