I think we all know by now that major social media platforms in the West are the target of multiple astroturfing and psyop campaigns by both private and state actors.

This post, while obvious in implication, is important as it is the first time I have seen this fact discussed on a major site without receiving a large volume of accusations of conspiratorial thought in recent memory. I think there is also an important meta-discussion to be had regarding our role in combating such campaigns as fediverse denizens.

Obviously, we don’t have the manpower to oppose things like this directly. There is additionally the unfortunate reality that we are not as immune here as we might like to think. I personally believe the fediverse likely is subject to similar astroturfing and that to believe otherwise is naive. However, even if there is no major targeting of sites like Lemmy, we are still subject to a trickledown effect from the major social media sites. Popular opinion will be swayed here indirectly by these campaigns regardless of if we are targeted specifically or not.

How can we protect our communities and more importantly our societies?

  • pelespirit@sh.itjust.works
    17·
    8 days ago

    Also, know the tactics:

    Once we isolate key people, we look for people we know are in their upstream – people that they read posts from, but who themselves are less influential. (This uses the same social media graph built before.) We then either start flame wars with bots to derail the conversations that are influencing influential people (think nonsense reddit posts about conspiracies that sound like Markov chains of nonsense other people have said), or else send off specific tasks for sockpuppets (changing this wording of an idea here; cause an ideological split there; etc).

    The goal is to keep opinions we don’t want fragmented and from coalescing in to a single voice for long enough that the memes we do want can, at which points they’ve gotten a head start on going viral and tend to capture a larger-than-otherwise share of media attention.

    (All of the stuff above is basically the “standard” for online PR (usually farmed out to an LLC with a generic name working for the marketing firm contracted by the big firm; deniability is a word frequently said), once you’re above a certain size.)

    https://archive.is/PoUMo

    from Bannon:

    “The opposition party is the media,” Steve Bannon, who helped run Trump’s 2016 campaign, told PBS Frontline five years ago. “And the media can only — because they’re dumb and they’re lazy — they can only focus on one thing at a time.”

    So the solution, per Bannon? Overwhelm them.

    “All we have to do is flood the zone,” he said. “Every day we hit them with three things. They’ll bite on one, and we’ll get all of our stuff done, bang, bang, bang. These guys will never — will never be able to recover. But we’ve got to start with muzzle velocity.”

    https://www.npr.org/2025/02/07/nx-s1-5289315/trump-week-in-review

    The best defense is to call them out on it and then walk away. They’ll downvote the shit out of you, but who tf cares about upvotes and downvotes. If someone is getting downvoted heavily, read what they said carefully before piling on.

    • Corgana@startrek.website
      8·
      8 days ago

      The best defense is to call them out on it and then walk away

      Yes exactly, I try to just simply describe what they are doing “This account is spreading the false narrative _____ for the purposes of ___” then not replying again. They want engagement because the more back-and-forth bickering that goes on, the less likely a third party reader is going to care to read beyond the top comment (the propaganda) and seeing a lot of replies can also give the impression that the debate is legitimate. Getting into a “debate” with someone “debating” in bad faith only helps them flood the zone with shit.