Ask Lemmy

The most powerful country in the world is a large disinformation piñata. You whack it with a few memes and poor decisions come out.

You can’t fault hostile intelligence for giving it a go, and there are a lot of hostile intelligence services.

https://lemmy.world/u/UniversalMonk

One week old account. 684 Comments. 383 Posts. That's 152 posts/comments a day, 9 an hour, and most are over a paragraph long. Almost all of them focus controversially on third-party advocacy in the middle of an election year.

Not saying this account is a bot, but a person would certainly have to be spending a whole lot of time on lemmy to be posting this much in one week so it certainly feels spamish.

I subscribe to communities and only read what I'm interested in. So I didn't notice anything. But I know lots of people use Lemmy differently and read the "All" feed. That might be an entirely different perspective.

Tl;dr election year in the US. It's only going to get more intense until the actual election.

On one hand, I hate election years.

On the other hand, as The Economist once had a cartoon pointing out, it could be worse.

It's all about the longest running election campaign in the world. The US elections. I don't understand why it needs to be this long 😂. France, the UK, India (over a billion people!) can announce and complete elections quicker than the US.

I would love some more intelligent and nuanced spam filtering but, honestly, I don't think we'll get anything soon enough.

It'll get better in November, but then we'll get a wave of spam about stolen elections. And then better again in January when they finally finish the election game.

Outside of the news and actual politics subs, the only political spam I see on the reg is posts like this complaining about political spam.

Keep in mind that American elections are coming up and Americans think the internet is only about them. So we're not only being dragged into this by disinformation campaigns.

Haven't seen that. But I have seen some users who spend every moment of their lives posting to sway opinion on an issue of their choosing. And if I accurately assess them as Russian paid trolls, I get all my comments removed and I get banned. So that's awesome and fair. Their content stays up, protected by mods. What an awesome feeling.

Yeah we're all subject to the mind virus that is US general elections.

It's US election year and this is (primarily) an English language site. Is that really a surprise?

Rather than block lists, just subscribe to the lemmy communities that interest you and don't subscribe to political/news communities. Then view lemmy through the "subscribed" feed rather than the "all" feed - no political posts - problem solved.

It’s been bad for a bit with the tankies here taking every opportunity to make some variant of “genocide Joe” comments but refusing to discuss any of the choices we had and the result of those choices.

They got super-quiet when Biden dropped out. Vanished.

Now we’re getting what appears to be a new wave.

Just blocked politics & news and my quality of life instantly jumped 200%. I highly recommend it. If something significant happens, you'll read about it in another community.

First time?

Don't worry, day after the election they mysteriously vanish as if they were never real at all.

Would be crazy if it were all just disinformation campaigns throwing shit at each other for 12 months.

Luckily no one's stupid enough to fall for all that.

There seems to be a few people suddenly calling Biden racist too, and trying to say both parties are the same. If it quacks like a lobbyist, it is possibly a lobbyist..

But yeah. This is overall probably due to the election more than anything.

People like me (I'm Aussie) will even up vote some things simply because I can't imagine how bad it would be for Trump to win again.. For the entire world.

What is not flooded with political spam these times? And I am afraid we have not seen nothing yet.

Nope, keyword filters help

Even worse for us that live outside the US. Nothing but US politics every time we scroll. Well, that and Linux stuff.

It's been nothing but politics and memes (often about politics) since the first day I joined. I can only imagine how bad it is without my content filters considering how bad it is even with them.

Absolutely, I had to immediately block the politics sublemmy. I noticed this change instantly as I always browse all. Suddenly my front-page was 95% politics posts. As if someone had flipped a lever.

I haven't really noticed much, but that's because I've taken to blocking political communities once they start bothering me by putting too many article links in the front page or being generally rageful.

I've literally been downvoting nothing but random political posts outside of politics communities and still they somehow worm into the hot feed. Mods should take a more serious "no politics spam" rule.

It is election year in the US, a very polarizing election with two high profile wars, any social media will be weaponized

Not really, but I am from Europe so I don't subscribe to communities connected to US news or politics. Can you give some examples?

Yes. There's also been a spike of political commentors that seem normal until you engage with them, then they fire back with emotionally-charged nonsense full of contradictions.