As of the time of this post, some 400 souls have upvoted the post, and therefore uncritically swallowed some bullshit with horrible data methodology.
The claim stems from a small data analysis done by a reddit user, which in theory, shows how a supposed blackout in Moscow is the reason why some purported bot posters in r/conservative stopped all their posting. Sounds good and believable. Until you do the barest minimum looking into it.
As a user points out in the comments of the original Reddit post:
So, there was no blackout in Moscow… There was a blackout in the city of Zhukovsky (100k inhabitants) as per this source, original claim from an Ukrainian news site.
Let’s see the hard data presented in a followup post after data collection methodology error correction due to timezones (lmao):
This is it. That’s literally all they have to do to convince 400 (and growing) .world users that “30-50% of the content on r/conservative comes from a Russian bot farm”. Find a correlation of ONE reported event of a blackout in a fucking tiny city of 100k inhabitants (likely not full blackout in all town) in a country of 150mn inhabitants with the posting in r/conservative. I’m not saying it’s not bots in reddit, obviously, but what’s the fucking link to everything coming from Russia?
Lemmy is so conspiracy brained against Russia that daring to venture into the big instances is such fucking cognitohazard. For the past year+ I’ve had a few accounts there trying to counter some of the propaganda, especially when it comes to China and to communism, to try and generate a bit more of a left perspective, but at this point I genuinely feel lost. They’re so deep in the propaganda that any conspiracy theory about Russia or China will get to the frontpage.
My bad you guys. I’ve been posting 30%-50% of all content on r/conservative but I stopped in solidarity with some people in Zhukovsky bravely going through a brief power outage. Guess they caught me.
ugh, I saw that post earlier. it’s always about ‘foreign’ influence for those guys. it’s not just ‘the foreigns’ who have an interest in driving online conversations!
This time it’s not even western mass media telling them, it’s literally a fucking random redditor. At least Lemmy isn’t representative of the average western (thats what I tell myself to keep me sane).
Daily reminder that the entire Russian bot hypothesis was based on a single privately-run spam factory in St. Petersburg called the Internet Research Agency which spent a total of $100k[1] in facebook ads from 2015 to 2017 and is alleged to have swung a presidential election in which $2.4 billion was spent.
Behold one of their machinations, from the Washington Post:
The goal of the dog lovers’ [facebook] page was more obscure. But some analysts suggested a possible motive: to build a large following before gradually introducing political content. Without viewing the entire feed from the page, now closed by Facebook, it is impossible to say whether the Russian operators tried such tactics.
Clinton Watts, a former F.B.I. agent now at the Foreign Policy Research Institute in Philadelphia, said Russia had been entrepreneurial in trying to develop diverse channels of influence. Some, like the dogs page, may have been created without a specific goal and held in reserve for future use.[2]
It’s so painful how there are endless articles on Wikipedia full of references to western media in Russian propaganda, but there’s not a Wikipedia article that I can find devoted (in English language Wikipedia at least) to USA disinformation. You know, we’ve literally seen all fucking western media engage in a coordinated campaign to promote Zionism, make false antisemitism accusations against pro-Palestine protesters, and to either cover or outright lie about hundreds of Israeli war crimes.
Wikipedia is simply not possible to fix.
I saw that exact post and came to mention the comment you’ve already highlighted. They’ve highlighted some weirdos that post to the conservative subreddit constantly, which definitely plays, but those weirdos might be turning point weirdos, or GOP weirdos, or just straight weirdos like my creepy neighbor that still has trump flags all over his house from 2016 with the “pence” part covered in duct tape bc he’s too cheap to upgrade to the new models. This is where trump is correct and trump derangement syndrome is real: it’s obviously not true for everyone who criticizes the piece of shit, but the john oliver neolib types that are still 9 years later like “ohh drumpf tiny hands Hillary should have won Russssssssssssssia 😏” it’s very much a thing.
This is indicative of a much wider problem on the broad internet that is regularly exploited: users on content aggregation platforms and social media read the headline and take it at face value. There is no critical thinking, there is no questioning the source, there isn’t even clicking through to read an article that is more often in this day and age less than a page. Even here on hexbear, a place where I’d expect people to at least be primed to read shit, I’ve gotten pushback for moderately lengthy comments like this with pithy replies like “I’m not gonna read all that”. People are fucking stupid now thanks to a weaponized program of algorithmic content that is designed to destroy your ability to attend to anything that’s longer than 1-3 sentences. People want that reddit top comment that justifies or concisely counters the headline. A systematic defunding of education combined with a societal push for “being smart is lame” doesnt help.
We are doomed
Even here on hexbear, a place where I’d expect people to at least be primed to read shit, I’ve gotten pushback for moderately lengthy comments like this with pithy replies like “I’m not gonna read all that”.
Yeah, that pisses me off too. It’s pretty funny when someone else comes along and replies something like “then why bother commenting” or “you should have, you might have learned something” though, lol. I think when people on here do it it’s sometimes a product of the semi-common “getting used to dunking on libs and accidentally deploying that against comrades too” pattern. “I ain’t reading all that” is a fine response to a zionist spewing the same tired lies they always do instead of debunking that bullshit for the 10,000th time and ending up just granting it legitimacy by taking it seriously, but not so much to a comrade making a point in good faith.
A systematic defunding of education combined with a societal push for “being smart is lame” doesnt help.
Marg bar anti-intellectualism. Bourgeois (especially western/global north) intellectuals generally suck, but that’s not an excuse for rejecting the concept of trying to analyze and understand things altogether the way a troubling number of people seem to enthusiastically do.
i did read all that, and you’re right.
free palestine
Axis.world will be metaphorically screaming about Steiner’s counterattack against the evidence of their lying eyes right up until the moment the weight of reality collapses their mental Fuhrerbunker onto their fragile self-image, and likely still for a long time after that.
What I’m saying is that they’re racist and in denial about it. Everything wrong with Amerikkka has to come from those dirty foreigners, otherwise they might have to suffer through even a minute amount of introspection, and I doubt they’d like what they find.
Them: This proves Russians literally caused conservatism and reaction in America. Before this Russian interference American Republican party members were normal humans who totally didn’t have abhorrent, vicious, anti-intellectual, fascist, oppressive views and drives.
Me: At most this shows maybe (maybe but probably not) Russians are trying to do some minor steering of a very heavy ship called American reaction. They didn’t build it, they can’t turn them into communists via this kind of posting but they can make some money, encourage some position softening towards Russia. Liberals find this abhorrent because they are Nazi Arming Terrorist Organization supporters and find any lessening of support for the militarist expansion of that group or indeed any concern for the concerns of a large civilization with a nuclear stockpile as unacceptable because they are rank, violent, unreasonable, bloodthirsty imperialists thanks to their own exposure to domestic, CIA, State Dept, White House, Atlantic Council propaganda.
Fact is these hypothetical Russians doing most of the posting (let’s just grant them this is true for argument’s sake) didn’t make conservatives hate gay people, they didn’t make them want to oppress trans people, they didn’t make them racist against black people and supportive of white police brutality against them, they didn’t make them support the interests of the bourgeoisie, they didn’t make them want to cut social services for poor people, they didn’t make them want a Christian supremacist nation predicated on oppression of all non-Christians. They didn’t make them support pedophiles and abusers. They didn’t make them science deniers. All they are allegedly doing is trying to make some amount of the group of bloodthirsty reactionaries less supportive of imperialism than they were during the neo-con era. One might say there are organic, domestic impetuses for this among the conservative movement as well after all the fallout of the Bush years and the war on terror and the changing economic situation pushing them anyways towards a kind of white supremacist isolationism. This is not even a bad thing and the real question for liberals is why are all of you supporting the militarism and imperialism you opposed during the Bush era when those uncouth neo-cons from Texas were doing it?
“Not about left and right but right and wrong”
I really hate this rhetoric. It’s always about left and right because left-wing thought is about empathy and equality while right-wing thought is about selfishness, fear and hatred. It literally is that simple. All right-wing thought is morally wrong. There is nothing redeeming about it. Trump is doing far-right politics and dumb right-wing voters don’t like how blatantly repugnant what they voted for actually is.
“Not about left and right but right and wrong”
To me (and to you) this just means “it’s not about right and wrong it’s about right and wrong”, and unlike them I’m not afraid to admit it because I have beliefs I’m willing to stand by.
LMAO they’re acting like there’s some kind of universal determiner of “right and wrong”. People who say this shit: pick a fucking side, dare to have an opinion and not be such a weasel that you won’t say it out loud. This “it’s not politics, it’s just right and wrong” is for fucking cowards pretending they don’t have a political agenda. The statement is built on the unstated basis that their chosen politics, which they claim not to have, represent “right”. Surprise: usually those chosen politics are monstrous and selfish shit, which is why they don’t state them outright.
I’ve never understood that. The whole point of having an opinion is believing you’re correct because of your evidence and moral convictions, and exposing others to it and vice versa. What’s the point of having an opinion if you’re you’re not gonna act accordingly?
it’s because they don’t have moral convictions. they just hate le drumpf
How would a blackout affect posting on a website in the age of smartphones, lol. Unless they see Russia as having no mobile service and no smartphones, which tbf people like this might.
russians can clearly only access the internet from the warehouse buildings where all the computers and toilets in the country are stored
It’s the conniving asians again!
according to a hastily deleted blog post from reddit themselves, one of the most “reddit addicted cities” in 2013 was eglin air force base, home to multiple am*rican military cyber warfare divisions and the source of a whitepaper that discusses methods of controlling and shaping “general consensus” opinions on social media
Could you link me up, comrade?
here’s the archive of the blog post: https://web.archive.org/web/20140409152507/http://www.redditblog.com/2013/05/get-ready-for-global-reddit-meetup-day.html?m=1
here are the units based there: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eglin_Air_Force_Base#Based_units
i’ll have to find the paper again, took me a while to find it the first time
Thanks a lot!!
it took them 5 years to delete it so idk that this holds up either. it won’t stop me from calling people “eglin air force base” and it is a lot of traffic in comparison to the population (including commuters), but i would think there’s more going on than immediately meets the eye
deleted by creator
700 upvotes and counting
