- cross-posted to:
- reddit@lemmy.world
- cross-posted to:
- reddit@lemmy.world
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buying a bunch of upvotes on a website dominated by bot accounts is a very cost effective way to run an AstroTurf campaign
“I thought trump was a terrible person, but the updoots be changed my mind”
Yeah sure. I mean there’s probably at least one or two feeble minded redditors like that but… Not a bunch. Especially if they’re confining themselves to right leaning subs.
Astroturfing is when corpos pretend to be grassroots
This is the equivalent of not being able to get your crush to like you, so you pay hooker just to tell people you got a girlfriend.
I bought Canada so I always have a Canadian supermodel girlfriend who just can’t be here right now.
So, putting aside the questionable morals of this person. I’m not sure alt right reddit threads are the election swing spot they seem to think.
Why would posting pro-Trump messaging on conservative friendly subs increase his chances of winning? Nobody who votes who spends any amount of time in those subs wasn’t going to vote for Trump. Also, buying upvotes? Pathetique!
The hope, I imagine, is that conservative subs are safe spaces where dissent can be controlled, and with enough purchased engagement, these posts can reach the front page where all the normal people gather.
This is just sad. How will this not get people sick and tired of it?
Fuckin reddit out of all places too
People have gotten sick and tired of r/pics having loads of political content, and while some candidates are better than others, many people are sick and tired of seeing “orange man bad” yet again. The people who were supposed to be propaganda targets immediately knew this was propaganda and the rampant election posts didn’t make Harris more popular. If this plan is enacted, people will see the astroturfing straightaway, and more people will see Trump supporters as bothersome cultists than as freedom fighters. It doesn’t help that, if pro-Trump people can brigade the sub, so can anti-Trump people, and the whole debacle will just get shut down.
I would have been so confused if I was still on reddit. Back then, downvotes were proof you were right and you triggered the woke hive, and upvotes meant you said obvious information, woke opinion or funny not offensive jokes. No upvotes/downvotes meant you said something either really thoughtfull or really boring.
1 day old account and already ousted yourself as a right-wing nutjob, good job! You’ve been tagged.
Lol, wow, i dont even know how stupid you have to be to think that im right-wing from my post. Or maybe you think every left-winger is woke? Which would be even more stupid 🤡
LMAO, you use “woke” unironically. “Woke” is nothing but a right-wing dog whistle against everything they don’t like, like the LGBTQ+ community
You can’t be “anti-woke” and left wing at the same time, it’s paradoxical.
Bruh, you are clearly the king of stupidity… Even a mussel is smarter than you…
You do realise that woke is how they describe themselves ? Its not the right wing who invented the term, its nonsensical to believe that only right winger use this term as a slang… It became a slang because all woke people are 🤡, they did it themselves, nothing to do with LGBTQ+, race or any political side…
But let me guess, you are a dumb US citizen, right? You cant be that ignorant and not be from the US…
Using “woke” unironically and getting downvoted means you are, in fact, a dumb ass.
Lol, you are talking about irony, yet you completely missed the point. Point that you are the perfect exemple.
Spot on, buddy, and im a dumbass? Lol, pathetic… 🤡
Not sure how I am an example. Please explain.
And I also don’t understand how up and downvotes can form an opinion for you. If that’s all it takes for you to make a decision, then you aren’t being very critical of what you are seeing. Surface level understanding plagues right wing nut jobs like yourself.
Lol, no worry buddy, its okay if you cant understand… 🤡
There absolutely no way this isn’t an ad for upvote buying services lol this is so insane and transparent and the worst part is it’ll work
Have to respect someone getting in on grifting conservatives without even endorsing their views in the process.
Honestly, there’s and endless sea of grift attempts going on at all times. You don’t think people selling fake gold Trump coins, etc give one damn about his politics, do you? They’re just trying to wring every penny out of the die hards
Man, the cash I could make with flexible ethics.
Right? I was going to sell 5g blockers online when the pandemic started, but I have some semblance of a conscience… Also my wife threatened to leave me if I did.
I read that as 5 grams and wondered what a blocker was that 5g worth of it would be extra valuable during the pandemic.
Last presidential election here in Brazil there were some some traffic light salesman selling towels with the presidential candidates. And they walked around with a score board showing which one had sold more. And they sold a lot more because people didn’t want to see their beloved candidate on the losing side.
I have to respect the mall t-shirt kiosks selling poorly made trump merch right next to the equally poorly made Kamala merch. At least they’re just there for the hustle
In this case they do very much help those views though. Either they create the appearance of public appeal, which draws more people to these views, or they manage to disrupt spaces that formerly fostered a different political culture.
If we look at Twitter we see the second aspect particularly strongly.
Keen observation skills. I wouldn’t have caught on, I’m sad to say.
How to milk the conservatives.
Thats exactly what I believe. I know there is no limits to stupidity, but don’t you use bots to make it seem legit? Who would go around saying, “hey guys we’re losing. We should use BOTS. We should buy BOTS ACCOUNT AND UPVOTES from BOTSFORSALE.org”
It screams Steve Bannon.
The all caps gave it away
I mean, it’s an ad but it’s also thought-provoking and interesting. Before now we all knew what was happening we just didn’t know the details also kind of interesting to see proof it’s a conversation starter. I think I would have preferred it if the author would have redacted the URL though.
“It is unambiguous clear that our message is toxic and the majority of people reject our ideology and us with it. Therefore, the most logical solution is to create an artificial narrative via manipulation and vote-buying that makes it appear that people like us.” -these people probably
Well, it worked with the news.
It also worked with Reddit. The Palestine discourse there is utterly repulsive and gleefully genocidal.
Is it really that bad? I haven’t been on Reddit in over a year.
worldnews is absolutely surreal and awful. Country specific subreddits are also getting worse and worse.
Holy shit you’re not wrong. I just browsed the top of the week on World News for a good twenty minutes and there wasn’t a single post about the thousands of civilians that have been killed. I didn’t see a single pro Palestine post and anybody talking about the literal war crimes being committed over there we’re just downvoted. I think I agree with your word choice of “surreal.” It feels like straight up propaganda and they are all falling for it. Every post about Israel was just saying something about how they’re taking out the terrorists.
I really wish I’d just taken your word for it. That’s depressing.
It’s hilariously ironic that I got banned from worldnews four years ago for criticizing the Saudi regime and how they use millennia-old scripture as justification to treat women horribly. Apparently that’s ‘bigotry.’
Everything I hear about the toxicity of worldnews these days is baffling.
Well, Saudi Arabia is an ally in all but name to Israel. Also both countries have excellent ties to large swaths of US politics.
Capitalism™
Or… I run a reddit botnet, and Christmas is coming up. What’s the easiest group of rubes to fleece?
That’s what they’ve been doing for decades. And unfortunately they’ve been very successful at it.
“Our opinions are wildly unpopular to the point where even if a bunch of us showed up we’d struggle to make a difference so we’re gunna need to buy upvotes!”
Like…c’mon.
Have you seen the content there?
Yeah they’re gonna need lots of money to get any attention
Oh wow, so it’s basically a content farm for /r/TheRightCantMeme
FYI unfortunately that sub got taken over by pro-russia and pro-ccp tankies.
One of the mod of the sub is also a hexbear mod.
Dumb enough to fall for a Facebook lie about Tim Walz, but smart enough to use a crappy image editor?
No, the Russians already provided the image with the lie
Fuckin’ yikes.
I love the conservatives think that’s such cutting slander when really having a male politician who understands the need for feminine hygiene products by uterus havers everywhere is such a breath of fresh air
The right may not have good ideas, organizational skills, charm, ethics, understanding of economics, history, or politics, or strength in numbers, but they do have the one thing more important than all of these.
Money!
I’d argue they do have organizational skills and and strength in numbers. Don’t underestimate that.
You don’t get and keep money without some of these skills though.
Eric Trump says “what?!”
And this after his father would have made 8 times more money by simply leaving it in the bank than all of his variety of hotel and Sharper Image steak sales businesses - he’s literally the only one I’ve ever heard of who managed to lose money running a casino!
“The system” is what makes wealth, not individual people these days. Obviously not solely, but the above example shows how it is the primary determination factor.
Gasp, you all surely don’t believe that conservatives would ever engage in voter manipulation tactics… r-r-right!?
No definitely not. They’ve been wanting “fair elections” all this time.
This must be why Trump said they people only need to vote one more time, and then they’ll never need to do so ever again.
One election, to rule them all… and in the darkness bind them
Why do I have a feeling this person has a vested financial interest in one of those upvote buying farms.
Who grifts the griftmen?
I literally haven’t heard of people buying engagement since like 2012 instagram when everyone was trying to be a rapper.
This is what they do in real life too though. They know the US is mostly liberal (based on the popular vote) so they have to abuse money and historical power to manipulate the votes into their favor.
“Ignore morality and get shit done”, aka The Ends Justify The Means
- God or something, probably?
Probably a scam, but congrats on discovering the Russian disinformation strategy from 2016.
Not exactly a scam. I still browse Reddit, and the Jordan Peterson Memes sub has been popping up in Popular for a few weeks, it had been a completely obscure sub before. The posts are ALL about US politics too…on a meme sub for a Canadian ‘life coach’
That’s because Jordan Peterson is one of the entry points to the alt-right rabbit hole. Despite being from Canada, his brand of grift is intricately tied to U.S. politics. If you have a very short amount of time, some people have put together some very short videos talking about Peterson:
https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLIK-x5uT6oS9EnO9-D6ePsWKOxtFhDZdF
Oh I’m definitely aware. The fact that some anti-woke content appears on the sub isn’t unexpected. The fact that it’s largely US political content is just a blatant display of meddling.
Ender’s Game was prescient text, regardless of Orson Scott Card’s personal beliefs.
Locke and Demosthenes are now armies of manipulative bots (but often real humans), shaping political discourse throughout the world. The Internet gave mind control powers to people with money, ambition, or both. We saw it with the Bernie Sanders and Trump movements in 2016 on Reddit, all too clearly for those who lived through an era where bullshit detection was a critical skill.
I was once fairly defeatist on this subject: the bad guys won, got Trump elected, and kicked off a new era of 80s conservatism that demonized progressive values like environmental conservation, freedom of choice in a number of matters, and equality.
But now, I’m starting to see young people stand up to their boomer relatives at Thanksgiving and bring facts and logic to social media discussions. And I have regained some hope that we will once again find a way to make the progressive “line go up“. Our society seems to swing like a pendulum between the right and left, over decades, and it feels like the Trump era was a swing too violent for most of us. It’s time to swing back.
Man, ever since the early 2010s I’ve thought about Ender’s Game a LOT - and it’s always this part of the book, never the zero-g laser tag or genocide-by-arcade-machine parts.
Didn’t Clinton spend $40m on shareblue forum sliding?
the Russian disinformation strategy
I’ll never understand why people attribute to the Russian government what was in the obvious best-interests of the Republican Party and the conservative movement.
If you asked who owns and operates the FOX News Channel, or Sinclair Media, or Clear Channel Radio, or any of the other dozen right-wing propaganda projects, I have to wonder how many people would reflexively insist “Russia” despite all of the money spilling in from the UK, Australia, Canada, Wall Street, Silicon Valley, and the O&G Industry.
I’ll never understand why people attribute to the Russian government what was in the obvious best-interests of the Republican Party and the conservative movement.
Maybe because there was a demonstrated and provable coordinated effort by the Russian government in the 2016 election to get Trump elected? Look up project lakhta. Russian election interference and the efforts of the domestic conservative movement can (and do) exist simultaneously.
What do you have against attributing to the Russian government actions that are demonstrably attributable to the Russian government?
I’ll be real, I have my suspicions regarding that whole scandal in 2016 because following the election there were like 2-3 days of quiet introspection by the Dems and then they aligned on “the Russians were pushing fake news that tricked everyone!”
My pet conspiracy theory is that it was already known within the political campaigns that these misinformation campaigns were happening and they chose to at that point publicize them and use that as their scapegoat. Same with the Russian spies they publicly outed that trump spoke with.
My pet conspiracy theory is that it was already known within the political campaigns that these misinformation campaigns were happening and they chose to at that point publicize them and use that as their scapegoat. Same with the Russian spies they publicly outed that trump spoke with.
Your framing is off. It’s not a conspiracy theory. It’s true that it was already known. The FBI investigation of Russian interference began before the election, not after. The investigation was being publicized before the election.
If you want to nurse a conspiracy theory about it, whatever. But you’re going to appear ignorant when you advance a conspiracy theory without doing the bare minimum of research into the known facts. You’re just creating a fictional narrative based on your “suspicions.” You’re not being “real.” You’re being ignorant.
I called it a conspiracy theory because it’s really just based purely off of observation and gut instinct and not facts. Good to know my gut instinct happened to be right though!
Your takeaway from my reply is that your instinct was correct? You’re going to make a great conspiracy theorist.
Meh my “conspiracy theories” just aren’t exciting enough because they tend to be too grounded in things that are actually likely in the real world and explaining weirdness in what is presented to the public with a guess as to what happened behind the scenes, like that the sonic movie was a joke pitch that somehow got greenlit so then they had to actually make the movie and to try to make it decent
Their values are aligned, theirs strategies are aligned, and so their efforts are aligned.
Because there have been literal articles and reports by the FBI that Russian interference in social media has been a thing since the 2016 election cycle.
That’s why it’s been attributed to the Russian government. Because the Russian government actually did a ton of stuff.
They were at it at least a year before the 2016 election cycle. I believe it was the CIA that said Russia was the one that created the Jade Helm scare in 2015 through social media influence.
Jade Helm was the name of a training operation of the US military in central TX near Temple. The Russians created a bunch of posts claiming that Obama was taking over local Walmarts and emptying them of all merchandise to use as prisoners for his political opponents. They even drew diagrams of the insides of the stores with the holding cells and everything. So great was the Russian influence that Abbott (who is still Governor of TX) ordered the TX National Guard to watch the training exercise and make sure that the US military wasn’t storming homes and taking prisoners.
there have been literal articles and reports by the FBI that Russian interference
There have been literal articles and reports by the FBI of domestic white nationalist organizing and domestic financing. Significantly more money and manpower is documented as entirely domestically organized, although a sizeable amount is moving between NATO and other Five Eyes states. We’re talking on the scale of tens of billions moving between domestic financiers - like the Mercers, Thiel, the Kochs, etc - and domestic fascist media/organizing. That dwarfs Russian state interventions. Its orders of magnitude different.
That’s why it’s been attributed to the Russian government.
Why do you search for the speck in your neighbor’s eye when you have a plank within your own?
