I just hope that the next new study doesn't end up being "New Study: At Least 15% of All Lemmy Content is Corporate Trolls Trying to Manipulate Public Opinion", otherwise I would be wondering WTF is going on, is Lemmy on the way of being enshittified by Corporate Morons?
According to backlink.com there is 265,500,000 active users per week so 15% of those weekly users means there is 39,825,000 corporate whores per week. To have the corporate whores filled with real people you would need the entire population of the following cities to even come close:
My first realization about this problem with reddit came about a decade ago when it became undeniable that shills flooded the discourse the moment Monsanto was mentioned.
People are literally defenceless vs propaganda. Me too. It takes extraordinary effort to decipher the fake from true and whether the true is a full truth or some small piece on silver platter.
At this point I gave up and I just try to find out motives of every… player and align myself with these that best serve my interests.
I don’t read much news because it’s all leftist or alt right propaganda drivel and while I align myself with the left because it serves my interests the best I won’t waste my time listening to their whatever narrative they crafted last week…
Just observe their actions and try to find out the motives and then ask if their motives align with yours. Their words or narrative are worthless drivel at this point, mostly.
Alt right drivel however is especially toxic and insulting but that is specifically done to evoke emotions. Anti gay propaganda crafted by closeted bisexual priests that want a piece from the table. It’s a bit like these email scammers who filter out less naive by making lots of grammar errors on purpose. You are supposed to be enraged either way.
That's alarmingly low - it suggests that it doesn't take much for any given influencing campaign. If there are fifteen discrete such campaigns in play, that's just 1/100 of everyone. Now imagine that there's tens of such campaigns, and the numbers look even more reasonable. Also, it's probably cost-effective at this scale since this has been with us a while, which is terrifying.
What I want to know is: what percentage are human users that ate the onionmetaphorical tequila worm^1^ and are now parroting these trolls?
1. Follow me here: drink a bottle and eat the worm inside. You're not thinking straight and did something you wouldn't do if you had your wits about you, or maybe a friend nearby that is thinking clearly. Propaganda has a way of forcing you into a phantasm by emotional manipulation, making it easy to jam all kinds of nonsense into your head. Extending the metaphor, said propaganda also lays out how to defend your worm eating habit as though it's totally normal to do.
I remember writing a comment about invasive advertising by Instagram. Just shared some anecdotes about how a few extremely specific conversation topics soon became the topic for the ads I was seeing on Instagram, and pointed out that if they were in fact using background conversation to target ads, it would be extremely easy to automate with the voice recognition technology available at the time, so why would they ignore the opportunity if targeted ads are their main source of revenue?
It became one of my most down voted comments at the time, and I had about twice as many replies as downvotes, claiming all kinds of wild or easily disproven shit to disprove the idea that Instagram used such tactics. Was very fishy
And remember, if THEY have thousands of bots that each 'think independently' but still end up downvoting your post en masse, then that's totally fine. But if YOU try to upvote your post with one of your alts so it doesn't get buried, that's bannable.
Devil's advocate here. Does not pretty much any post on the subject of politics that is not simply reporting constitute an attempt to manipulate public opinion? Are they specifically referencing nation states trying to influence public opinion?
You see an ad, you recognize it as an ad. Your opinion is probably unchanged.
You see a user saying "Hey this product is actually pretty good," it's more likely to sway your feelings on the product, or at least your perception of the general sentiment to the product.
Me telling you my opinion on something is just that. I am just some guy. I don't have access, or even want access, to a billion bots spamming my opinion.
Also my opinion even if applied really doesn't mean much practically. Generally speaking I am pro infrastructure so if somehow the government spent more money on infrastructure that only translates, at best, to a small raise on my part. Not the same as say a major corp.
You see a community board where people can put up ads. What you expect to see are piano lessons, apartment for rent, tutoring etc. little things that really only matter to one person. You don't expect some megacorp to rip every sign down and turn it into a billboard that blasts from speakers each time someone walks past.
Basically it's a question of degree not of kind. It might be that it is all the same kind but the degree is so vastly different.