this post was submitted on 11 Feb 2025
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Fediverse vs Disinformation

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Pointing out, debunking, and spreading awareness about state- and company-sponsored astroturfing on Lemmy and elsewhere. This includes social media manipulation, propaganda, and disinformation campaigns, among others.

Propaganda and disinformation are a big problem on the internet, and the Fediverse is no exception.

What's the difference between misinformation and disinformation? The inadvertent spread of false information is misinformation. Disinformation is the intentional spread of falsehoods.

By equipping yourself with knowledge of current disinformation campaigns by state actors, corporations and their cheerleaders, you will be better able to identify, report and (hopefully) remove content matching known disinformation campaigns.


Community rules

Same as instance rules, plus:

  1. No disinformation
  2. Posts must be relevant to the topic of astroturfing, propaganda and/or disinformation

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[–] [email protected] 27 points 1 week ago (4 children)

Even if this person is a troll, setting up all of these communities and making multiple posts all across the place to audience of none is pretty fucking sad. I mean, look at this:

Screenshot_20250211-163756_Firefox

This person actually spent time typing all of this as if they're speaking to all of their close friends. And two days later there it still is with the one default upvote and no comments.

In fact, this is making me literally sad for this person now. They probably need professional help.

[–] [email protected] 13 points 1 week ago (1 children)

i reckon monk thinks they’re trolling. they certainly think they’re doing something.

it is uniquely sad to watch though, like an injured animal snapping at it’s only hope for assistance.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 week ago (2 children)

It occurs to me that this could be corporate or even governmental.

Otherwise it's a lot of time and thought going into nothing or at best a long game. Very sad.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 week ago (3 children)

This is automated, not even that hard to code. More so if done in an separate instance. Also not hard to detect and autoban in theory on regular instances.

Lemmy needs a decentralized reputation system where all the big instances score people automatically so the fakes don't appear at all.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 week ago (1 children)

Hard to do in a manner that is resistant to gaming by bad actors (see: Reddit).

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 week ago (1 children)

If darknet markets can do it, so can we. I'm a distributed systems security specialist. This is existing technology. We would require something like spamhouse etc. Everybody can run an email sever, but building reputation takes a bit. Blockchain can do some parts of that to make it auditable.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago)

Not my area of expertise, so, I'd defer to those such as yourself. I absolutely think it's possible but, not simple to do in a resilient manner. Even with a publicly auditable ledger, there's a risk of becoming realistically unauditable due to massive quantity of data (as seen in some open source projects), which would need mitigations.

If you have any recommended readings or the like on such things, I'd appreciate them.

[–] UniversalMonk -5 points 1 week ago

I'm not automated.

Yet.