I use a few social media platforms at the same time. I'm used to seeing the same things on each platform. That's how the internet has been for years - you read the same things on the same five sites.

To be fully transparent, Lemmy isn't at the top. I don't post much and I lurk. Sometimes I post a comment here and there.

But this past week, I'm seeing more and more interesting content in the "Everything" section of Lemmy that I didn't see in my other social media feeds. New communities and more interesting convos.

Uncertain if the fediverse has gotten a wave of new posters, some algorithm has changed, or every other social media company is sucking more and more thanks to America Team Police...

Just wanted to share my extremely limited anecdotal non-fact checked viewpoint.

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[–] hector@lemmy.today 2 points 8 hours ago (1 children)

The vast majority of bots, and it's more accurate to say influence operations as real people direct fake accounts with bots, and now chatbots, sophisticated ones for some issues, are working for commercial interests. Trade groups of all types. Any toxic chemical they use has keywords scramble a response to any mention of it. Real agents cycling through accounts backed by bots. AI, actually Indians, in many cases, as they've good english and can work for cheaper.

But the State Actors are getting worse, the US aligned ones exploded in number and visibility after the Venezuela operation I noticed. I'm sure the build up to the next forever war with Iran because Israel first has armies of bots. I've seen some influence operations on lemmy here in regards to that reddit must be overrun by it.

[–] reabsorbthelight@lemmy.world 3 points 7 hours ago* (last edited 7 hours ago) (1 children)

Russian bots have been noted rewriting history on Wikipedia for Baltic and ex-ussr countries recently too. I read about #estonia having to fight to preserve accurate history about Soviet imperialism on Wikipedia.

It was also noticable that contra-US bots were driving polarization leading up to the US election. There were a number of topics that went silent the day after election.

[–] hector@lemmy.today 2 points 6 hours ago

Influence operations, mechanized troll divisions and supporting units, were also deployed en masse to back up the democratic annointee that was chosen without contest in 2024 in July with over 4 months to go. Many just getting shitty with anyone calling for a challenge, an electable candidate that wasn't at 30% or less approval all term and hadn't won a single state in the primary of the previous term, and anyone calling for a winnable strategy otherwise. Shadowy groups, many right aligned, russian types, many oligarchs that don't want a strong reform minded democratic leader to revoke their newly acquired license, and out and out aligned with the Republicans that want an opponent they could beat, all surely have influence operations across social media, and interfere into democratic nominations.

As I was saying at the time, Bannon must have been high fiving his jailers, (turns out they were also high fiving the mobsters in the prison, that's whose table Bannon sat at, he palled around with the Italian mobsters in there, to the surprise of no one that's been paying attention,) when they chose her without contest, when their influence operations got on left aligned groups online to level vitriol at anyone arguing for a winning strategy. The democratic establishment hire their own influence operations as well in service of keeping control of the party for the aristocracy/donors.

Social Media is just too corrupted, the companies can't be trusted to moderate in good faith, powerful groups have their hooks in them and get them to moderate dishonestly, they not only ignore connected influence ops, they dishonestly violate real users not breaking the rules to any reasonable person standard, on the words of these influence operations, be it homeland security sending lists of accounts to find random reasons to ban, or by them mass flagging an account with their armies of bots until something sticks.

Everything is overrun now, over half of users are estimated to be fake accounts now, and over half the content on the internet is written by machines. Half of the websites, those enshitified search results you get since 2021? All machine written to hit search engine results. Every organization with money, every country, can hire these well developed industry of buggering reality, be it russia on wikipedia or groups conning people into throwing an election by choosing the wrong person, or an industry that systematically poisons entire watersheds and populations to save a marginal amount of money on waste disposal. And it works, all of it works. Without leadership and organization in opposition the organized interests of big money wins every time.