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I hate this calling idiots bots stuff. It's like calling people NPCs. I think I'm getting old.
Yeah, the majority of them aren't "bots". It's mostly people acting as useful idiots, parroting talking points put forth by Kremlin backed trolls. The shit reeks of 2018's totally organic "Walk Away" movement -- the arguments and slogans practically rhyme.
I don't like the "bots" thing either since it's inaccurate to what's actually going on, but at the same time I don't know a concise way to call out pretty obvious Russian state backed AstroTurfing.
I think we really underestimate the amount of trolling that professional trolls do, I don't think the amount of useful idiots online is that big. While the Russian IRA was knocked offline during the 2018 usa elections, I found that the discourse on reddit was radically different. Subreddits like walkaway or the Donald were suddenly absent from my front page and discussions seemed more civil.
A professional working a 9-5 job of making troll posts, who is using professional tools, who has scores of accounts and spreadsheets with prepared talking points that are based on data analysis, who is working to hit kpi, ... That single professional is able to make a lot more posts and have a much bigger impact than a large group of geezers shitposting on their smartphones.
I agree that there's a lot of direct trolling online, but I wouldn't discount the number of "useful idiots".
Remember Q-anon? The core of that entire "movement" was a handful of people on an obscure website steering discourse and pumping out conspiracy theories to a few hundred dedicated direct followers. That audience served as both a testbed for ideas and a free "localization service" -- they'd take an unpolished core idea and through discourse transform it into something marketable for wider consumption. Said followers obscure the source of the messaging, amplify it, spread it to traditional social media / the real world, "fight" dissidents, etc.
Those "useful idiots" are a fundamental part of an efficient, cost effective, and successful disinformation campaign.
The useful idiots are pumped up by bots upvoting.
I fucking hate the NPC thing specifically. The bots is one thing, you may not actually know if it's an honest person or a paid bot, but to call someone an NPC is just dehumanizing people.
You do all sorts of shit to an NPC in a video game you'd never do to a real person. I hate that it's normalizing dehumanization.
Kremlin propaganda is a huge problem and sticking your head in the sand isn't helping.
You'll have to clarify what you're accusing me of here. Are you arguing that the people who support Russia's invasion on this platform aren't real people? That they're not actually a combination of bootlickers and folks that actually believe any harm to American hegemony is a positive? Because there are a whole lot of the latter here because they've gotten banned from many other platforms, and not a great reason to spend the resources on the former.
I'm saying that your hand waving away the idea that there are bots on here is short-sighted and ignoring the problem is a terrible idea.
I'll keep hand waving it unless you point to a real instance of a propaganda bot program on this laughably small slice of the Fediverse. A few comments are not fucking AI driven. The entire concept is ridiculous. Nobody's building auto-reply bots to respond to many articles when we've only got a handful of people, like @MicroWave@lemmy.world , who even bother to post the fucking articles.
At some point, the "russian bots are really out on parade" comments are practically a Markov Chain response in their own right.
There would be less talk about them if there weren't so many and Russia wasn't known for botting propaganda every chance they get.
They are really obvious at this point.
Of all the automated posting tools circulating in the US, how many of them are Russian?