this post was submitted on 23 Sep 2024
202 points (97.6% liked)

Against Astroturfing and Social Media Manipulation

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Pointing out, fighting, spreading awareness about State sponsored and Company sponsored astroturfing on Lemmy and elsewhere. This includes social media manipulation, propaganda, and disinformation campaigns, among others.

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cross-posted from: https://slrpnk.net/post/13586199

Taking the fight to Reddit... FOR MONEY.

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[–] YurkshireLad 41 points 4 months ago

“You must do this for me but you must use your own money!!”

[–] [email protected] 33 points 4 months ago (2 children)

I just found out that those pages to buy votes exist, I knew that bots and stuff existed, but I thought it was something more "hidden", from 4 cents per vote, it doesn't surprise me that the site is completely going down the toilet

[–] [email protected] 12 points 4 months ago (1 children)

it’s so essy to make a bot too. And reddit is earning loads through the API so they don’t bother to stop it.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 4 months ago (1 children)

You dont even need api for upvote farming

Its like 3 lines of selenium

[–] [email protected] 3 points 4 months ago

If you do it en masse, reddit detects it and sends your account a warning. It’s purposefully built to make you use the API.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 4 months ago

In some impoverished regions, vote farming is an important (and sometimes only) source of some people's income. Create account, upvote post, dozens or hundreds of times a day. They get paid slave wages, if at all.

[–] [email protected] 22 points 4 months ago

If I owned those bot voting sites, this is what I’d do.

[–] [email protected] 13 points 4 months ago

I can’t tell if this is astroturfing or high-level trolling. Encouraging MAGAts to piss away their money and actually give a damn about Reddit sounds like a pretty evil strategy to me.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 4 months ago (1 children)

I'd die laughing if someone was able to do this on Lemmy and buy something like 3k votes, an unseen number. Or better yet, 30k votes. You'd be on All and see that and know something was up.

Thank goodness we're too small and unimportant for them to interrupt my Linux and Startrek memes with that nonsense.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 4 months ago (1 children)

Unfortunately, this has happened and is likely still happening on lemmy (mostly for comments and not posts). see here.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 4 months ago

Heard about that. It's not though to push some weird conservative view to top of all but I imagine it's a setup for is Lemmy ever becomes profitable.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 4 months ago

Are we supposed to act like this is new? The Hillary Clinton campaign was doing this via CTR (Correct The Record) back in 2016 and it was particularly noticeable after the DNC forced Bernie Sanders to exit the race. It continued after the election when CTR transitioned to "ActBlue".

Then there's the 2016 Reddit MAGA craziness but I don't think there's any need to re-hash that. It's CTR that most people don't know / forget about.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 4 months ago

Nonono see these Lemmy users who constantly push Jill Stein said this doesn't happen so it obviously doesn't happen.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 4 months ago