As of the time of this post, some 400 souls have upvoted the post, and therefore uncritically swallowed some bullshit with horrible data methodology.
The claim stems from a small data analysis done by a reddit user, which in theory, shows how a supposed blackout in Moscow is the reason why some purported bot posters in r/conservative stopped all their posting. Sounds good and believable. Until you do the barest minimum looking into it.
As a user points out in the comments of the original Reddit post:
So, there was no blackout in Moscow... There was a blackout in the city of Zhukovsky (100k inhabitants) as per this source, original claim from an Ukrainian news site.
Let's see the hard data presented in a followup post after data collection methodology error correction due to timezones (lmao):
This is it. That's literally all they have to do to convince 400 (and growing) .world users that "30-50% of the content on r/conservative comes from a Russian bot farm". Find a correlation of ONE reported event of a blackout in a fucking tiny city of 100k inhabitants (likely not full blackout in all town) in a country of 150mn inhabitants with the posting in r/conservative. I'm not saying it's not bots in reddit, obviously, but what's the fucking link to everything coming from Russia?
Lemmy is so conspiracy brained against Russia that daring to venture into the big instances is such fucking cognitohazard. For the past year+ I've had a few accounts there trying to counter some of the propaganda, especially when it comes to China and to communism, to try and generate a bit more of a left perspective, but at this point I genuinely feel lost. They're so deep in the propaganda that any conspiracy theory about Russia or China will get to the frontpage.
I saw that exact post and came to mention the comment you’ve already highlighted. They’ve highlighted some weirdos that post to the conservative subreddit constantly, which definitely plays, but those weirdos might be turning point weirdos, or GOP weirdos, or just straight weirdos like my creepy neighbor that still has trump flags all over his house from 2016 with the “pence” part covered in duct tape bc he’s too cheap to upgrade to the new models. This is where trump is correct and trump derangement syndrome is real: it’s obviously not true for everyone who criticizes the piece of shit, but the john oliver neolib types that are still 9 years later like “ohh drumpf tiny hands Hillary should have won Russssssssssssssia 😏” it’s very much a thing.
This is indicative of a much wider problem on the broad internet that is regularly exploited: users on content aggregation platforms and social media read the headline and take it at face value. There is no critical thinking, there is no questioning the source, there isn’t even clicking through to read an article that is more often in this day and age less than a page. Even here on hexbear, a place where I’d expect people to at least be primed to read shit, I’ve gotten pushback for moderately lengthy comments like this with pithy replies like “I’m not gonna read all that”. People are fucking stupid now thanks to a weaponized program of algorithmic content that is designed to destroy your ability to attend to anything that’s longer than 1-3 sentences. People want that reddit top comment that justifies or concisely counters the headline. A systematic defunding of education combined with a societal push for “being smart is lame” doesnt help.
We are doomed
Yeah, that pisses me off too. It's pretty funny when someone else comes along and replies something like "then why bother commenting" or "you should have, you might have learned something" though, lol. I think when people on here do it it's sometimes a product of the semi-common "getting used to dunking on libs and accidentally deploying that against comrades too" pattern. "I ain't reading all that" is a fine response to a zionist spewing the same tired lies they always do instead of debunking that bullshit for the 10,000th time and ending up just granting it legitimacy by taking it seriously, but not so much to a comrade making a point in good faith.
Marg bar anti-intellectualism. Bourgeois (especially western/global north) intellectuals generally suck, but that's not an excuse for rejecting the concept of trying to analyze and understand things altogether the way a troubling number of people seem to enthusiastically do.
i did read all that, and you're right.
free palestine