Take this post for example: https://www.reddit.com/r/northernireland/comments/1ll6ocg/see_it_say_it_censored_kneecap_is_not_the_story/
Speaking from experience, people in Ireland are overwhelmingly pro-palestine.
There is this user in the comments: https://www.reddit.com/user/EntireCourage308/
Its a nearly year-old account, it started posting about a month ago, it made some innoculous posts, then pivoted to posting far-right misinformation in the r/northernireland subreddit.
There’s loads of other accounts just like it.
Amusingly enough, brazen astroturfing (especially in political subs) was one of the main reasons I was looking for an alternative to Reddit and found Lemmy. Two years ago.
And it’s certainly only gotten worse since.
Do people think there is a reason this won’t happen to Lemmy eventually?
Well, first off it can’t bhappen “to Lemmy” because Lemmy isn’t va site - it’s a piece of software.
It not only can and will but already has happened to individual instances. And they end up getting defederated by other instances and then either fix the problem or fade away.
And individual users can just move to other instances (or if they’re smart, just stop using or even delete their account on the problem instance and keep using their other accounts on other instances).
And through it all, the rest of the fediverse just keeps chugging along.
Which illustrates the key difference between Lemmy/Mbin/Piefed/etc. and traditional social media - the fediverse is flexible. Individual instances can and will and do come and go, and it doesn’t affect the fediverse as a whole.
It will definitely happen to lemmy, unless someone conceives an ingenious AI sieve beyond current human reckoning. But the bots haven’t yet come to our peaceful little commie Linux forum, and that’s something worth appreciating, in and of itself. Every day is a blessing.
As in I genuinely don’t know if the fediverse tech helps with ai spamming - my assumption is even if it ever became a real threat to mainstream social media or big tech it would be flooded by ai bots anyways
Even with it being federated I don’t see how Lemmy could be immune to astroturfing. I’m sure there’s some already going on. Lemmy just isn’t yet popular enough to be a major target. Instances can defederate from one another but it’s trivial to create a new account on a different instance and resume turfing. I suppose the openness of Lemmy’s logs, when compared to the closed-source centralized nature of reddit, could help suss out turfers though.
Sure there’s individuals doing it already.
It only becomes a problem when a medium starts reaching a significant audience, then interventions are needed, like when Reddit boomed. Then the US regime put their puppet there.
Same as they did with Facebook,etc…
With Lemmy being different I suppose they will have to find new ways or just massively use bots or paid trolls.
Same story. One year ago. That and stopping drinking are some of the best choices I’ve made in a long time.
I still use reddit occasionally for its smallest communities where I know I’m still interacting with humans. I assume the top posts are all bot posts with bots flaming bots in the comments. Everyone’s time is worth more than that.
Bring back the enthusiast forums that were supported by calendar and sticker sales, we didn’t know how good we had it.
I’ll only search up reddit posts on Google, and it’s almost always about a movie/show or a game I’m currently playing or looking to play.
SAME. I had been very sick and off social media during the whole exodus, so had no clue about the lemmyverse, but going back to reddit the astroturfing was sooo bad, I just had to look for alternatives.