Take this post for example: https://www.reddit.com/r/northernireland/comments/1ll6ocg/see_it_say_it_censored_kneecap_is_not_the_story/
Speaking from experience, people in Ireland are overwhelmingly pro-palestine.
There is this user in the comments: https://www.reddit.com/user/EntireCourage308/
Its a nearly year-old account, it started posting about a month ago, it made some innoculous posts, then pivoted to posting far-right misinformation in the r/northernireland subreddit.
There’s loads of other accounts just like it.
Amusingly enough, brazen astroturfing (especially in political subs) was one of the main reasons I was looking for an alternative to Reddit and found Lemmy. Two years ago.
And it’s certainly only gotten worse since.
Do people think there is a reason this won’t happen to Lemmy eventually?
close all registrations, become a stricter process to federate, etc. if thats ever an issue
It will definitely happen to lemmy, unless someone conceives an ingenious AI sieve beyond current human reckoning. But the bots haven’t yet come to our peaceful little commie Linux forum, and that’s something worth appreciating, in and of itself. Every day is a blessing.
As in I genuinely don’t know if the fediverse tech helps with ai spamming - my assumption is even if it ever became a real threat to mainstream social media or big tech it would be flooded by ai bots anyways
Even with it being federated I don’t see how Lemmy could be immune to astroturfing. I’m sure there’s some already going on. Lemmy just isn’t yet popular enough to be a major target. Instances can defederate from one another but it’s trivial to create a new account on a different instance and resume turfing. I suppose the openness of Lemmy’s logs, when compared to the closed-source centralized nature of reddit, could help suss out turfers though.
Sure there’s individuals doing it already.
It only becomes a problem when a medium starts reaching a significant audience, then interventions are needed, like when Reddit boomed. Then the US regime put their puppet there.
Same as they did with Facebook,etc…
With Lemmy being different I suppose they will have to find new ways or just massively use bots or paid trolls.
I remember when we used to laugh and ignore people with these default-generated Reddit usernames… What a stupid community they’ve become. If you can’t take the few seconds to create a username, you’re not there for anything more than spamming bullshit.
