this post was submitted on 05 Aug 2024
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[–] [email protected] 18 points 3 months ago (1 children)

Not to be "that guy" who doesn't trust everything he reads on the internet, but... what credible sources are saying that "most of the internet troll groups are ... pushing right wing narratives? I wonder how they would track such a thing.

[–] [email protected] 25 points 3 months ago (2 children)

You'll get the hang of detecting paid trolls (or peoplec onvinced by them), there are lots of signs like Never back down, change the narrative (die hard people do not often do that), has lots of info that is somewhere in betweed what you are discussing and line USAbad/Russia_china-not-bad, Always lean onto one side, even if it's subtle... sometimes not.

And dude are they 99% pro dictators/trump/anti-demicracy/... you get the idea.

For example, people calling out Biden for the Israeli war crimes, but conveniently forgetting Trump. And also because it was a pro Trump thing, now when Biden stepped down for reelection (shouldn't change anything, right? A warcrime or genocide is still there) they all vanished...

[–] [email protected] 3 points 3 months ago (2 children)

It's equally possible you're just assuming everyone who doesn't share your opinion is a paid troll. I got called a Russian troll multiple times for saying Biden had no business being in this election and that we could do better. Imo it's far more likely you're talking to a child than a "paid troll" if their opinions don't make sense and they dig their heels in. Assuming everything is some grand conspiracy instead of accepting that some people have different beliefs and opinions, or might just be that stupid, simply isn't healthy. Trolls and such exist, sure, but I don't think they are anywhere near as common as you're implying.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 3 months ago

Sure, but it's also quite obvious when you stumble upon a real one. And I mean for example thinking 100.000 recent deaths is okay because NATO scary (for example) just boils down to either deluded or paid. IMO.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago)

No, there's more to it. All the troll farms that get busted are disinformation machines, and most of them are sponsored by Russia.

https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/ukraine-takes-down-massive-bot-farm-seizes-150-000-sim-cards/

https://eu.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2024/07/09/feds-disrupt-bot-farm-that-spread-social-media-lies-for-putin/74343215007/

https://edition.cnn.com/2023/02/14/europe/russia-yevgeny-prigozhin-internet-research-agency-intl/index.html

There's also Cambridge Analytica. And there was the Mueller report.

It isn't a feeling, it's facts. And I have said it way before there was evidence. OP is right, it's easy to detect them. I use the tag feature to keep track. A lot of my tags vanished a couple weeks ago, so I assume there was a sweep or bills haven't been paid.. Some I had to readjust because my first impression was wrong, and they were indeed organic users that argued like bots.

I had been hunting bots on reddit for years, you get a sense for it, and also where they're from and what their intentions are.

They're plentiful but currently at a low, at least on Lemmy and Youtube.

Edit: For a while there appears to be also bots from everything left of Putin and Trump now, but they seem to be informative and fighting against the disinformation of the farms that have wrecked havock since 2015.

Edit 2: I agree with you though, there's a lot of real people that believe and repeat the lies they've learned from the bots

[–] explodicle 2 points 3 months ago (1 children)

Maybe they "vanished" because they got what they wanted: an anti-genocide candidate. There's not much point in saying that Trump is a fascist here because we all agree on it.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 3 months ago

It was just an example. Among many.