this post was submitted on 24 Jan 2025
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Trump immigration crackdown begins: ‘I’ve never been scared like this before’ (www.theguardian.com)
submitted 1 week ago by [email protected] to c/politics
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[–] [email protected] 43 points 1 week ago (1 children)

I started going back through the database, trying to put together a little collection of quotes from people that were saying pre-election that Biden was basically a carbon copy of Trump, on immigration, and using it as a reason not to support Biden.

I was going to tag them, and quote what they said back to them, and ask now what was up with that. Honestly I just kind of lost my stomach for the whole operation after a pretty short time. A lot of the people evaporated between then and now. A lot of what they had to say was just endlessly repeating technically-true context free statements like "Biden deported more people than Trump" instead of explicitly stating the argument that Biden was just as bad. And what's the point? Hopefully, we're aware by now that the people who were slinging well-intentioned left sourced criticism why they couldn't possibly stomach voting for a Democrat, were helping to create the nightmare we're currently at the very beginning of, and that they were wrong.

[–] [email protected] 17 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (1 children)

A lot of the people evaporated between then and now. A lot of what they had to say was just endlessly repeating technically-true context free statements like "Biden deported more people than Trump" instead of explicitly stating the argument that Biden was just as bad. And what's the point?

Yep. I banned soooo many "concern troll" / agenda posting accounts like that. Wish more instances would have done that (not that I think Lemmy had that much of an impact on the election, but just a general kind of thing).

It's incredibly easy to spot these accounts by just clicking their username and looking at their one-track histories. Even the most ardent online activist (which would be a potential false positive here) takes the occasional break and engages in other interests or cracks a joke or two.

And many of those accounts were boosted by vote manipulation accounts. Right now, community mods can technically see votes in their communities, but Lemmy-UI doesn't have that exposed to them. I think only Tesseract has that capability at the moment. But that's definitely something mods need to be aware of.

Hopefully we've learned something from this past election re: sockpuppet agenda accounts.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (1 children)

Yep. I banned soooo many “concern troll” / agenda posting accounts like that. Wish more instances would have done that (not that I think Lemmy had that much of an impact on the election, but just a general kind of thing).

Yeah. We saw one head of the hydra, the one that was optimized to appeal to people who care about Gaza and immigration, but it was only the one. Other voters saw other messaging that wouldn't have worked at all on Lemmy people. The point is not that Lemmy had any impact, it is that the hydra is a bad and significant thing.

It blows my mind that Lemmy admins don't seem to grasp that this is a problem. Every election-related comments section was and still is filled with obviously engineered-for-a-purpose bullshit, and they're like "ho hum doo doo doo well I guess everyone can say what they like, free speech ya know, please be civil." It's not that the Nazi at the table in the back is breaking any of the "rules" of the lunchroom. It's that he is a Nazi. Fuck him. He needs to get out.

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

I don't disagree, but it's not quite as easy as that especially for admins of a large instance. It's just a lot of voices, some legitimate, some part of a hydra campaign, and others legitimate but only spouting the hydra narrative because they heard it so much and bought into it (forgive the term, but "useful idiots").

For as many as I banned myself (I run a small instance), I probably let 10 slide because I couldn't prove they were one of the hydra heads.

My instance is small enough to fly under the radar, but for larger instances, the hydra heads will absolutely flood the YePowerTrippingBastards-esque communities and screech they're being censored, [Big instance] is censoring [blank], [Big instance] wants genocide, etc in an attempt to spread their message via a corrupted version of the Streisand Effect.

TL;DR is it's an easy game for the bad actors to play and a very unlevel playing field for everyone else. I wish there were an easy answer, but there really isn't. The only way I've found to combat it on my own instance is to just disallow "agenda posting" (which I realize is a very blunt instrument, but it's the best I can do given the platform limitations).

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 week ago (1 children)

Yeah, agreed on all counts. I've seen them trying to manipulate the mod teams to do their bidding, and I sort of suspect that the campaign against FlyingSquid happened because he was taking action against the misinformation and they don't like that and want to bully him out so they'll have less resistance in the future.

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

They did the same to Jordan Lund in politics as they did to squid in Word news. So yeah, most likely.

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

Did they? What happened? I didn't hear about this. politics@LW was so bizarre and useless that I gave up on it a while back.

I feel like Jordan could be pressured into doing things the way someone was pressuring him to do them, and so they tried to pressure him, while FS would argue for what he thought was right, and so they tried to get rid of him completely. And I think on both counts they've been succeeding pretty well.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 week ago

It's been a while, but the troll in question was spamming Jordan's avatar image all over the place with a lot of unflattering (and false) accusations (I'll just leave it at that).