I always wonder if Russia would collapse, if suddenly a lot of the disinfo & hate on various online media would become noticeably quieter.
As I recall there was a period a couple years back where Russia was cut off from the greater internet and a lot of interesting things got quieter, including r/conservative on Reddit.
That partially already happened at the start of the war. There was a massive “brain drain” among the higher educated part of society, which did include a bunch of hackers. Why live inside russia these days when you can move elsewhere and get paid better?
Exposing the crimes of the NSA is one reason.
Yeah that is so fucking sick.
Signal FTW and long live Snowden!
there’s also iran, I wouldn’t be surprised if north korea and china also have bot farms, and then even in america evangelical christians fund shady hate operations around the world too
its well known china has an enormous online presence set around spreading misinformation, and of course the worlds best ‘whataboutisms’ you are ever likely to see
You can see them all over the lemmy.ml worldnews community talking about how Ukranians dying needlessly isn’t anybody else’s concern and any aid to them will immediately mean nuclear annihilation of the entire world.
we need to give in to every single one of putins demands otherwise you’re in favor of WW3 😠😠😠 /s
Oh man, where would Lemmy be without all the communist
propagandamemes?communist propaganda
It’s like you know that these are words, and they’re words that you’ve seen people put together in the past, but you have no idea what they mean.
Where is anyone talking about communism? Where is the propaganda? What the fuck are you even talking about??
We’re on different instances, bet our top day looks very different.
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Is there a way to keep the Lemmy homepage set to my subscriptions rather than the default for the instance? I have to manually change it to the subscribed tab every time I open Lemmy
There’s an option in your profile settings.
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Where is anyone talking about communism?
Lemmygrad.ml, I assume? I dunno if it’s “propaganda,” though, mainly because I haven’t really seen much from that instance. It isn’t defederated or anything; it just apparently isn’t popular enough to show up in Active/Hot/Top.
I see a lot of communism good/capitalism bad meme content in lemmy.ml in general. Now I’m really not against communism and I absolutely see the negative effects of western society’s brand of unregulated late stage capitalism, but political meme content in general is just entirely devoid of all nuance to the point where people are seriously dropping silly statements like “capitalism is the sole contributor to climate change”, as if if you could turn off capitalism climate change would just stop lol. It’s straight up propaganda.
That and conveniently ignoring any negatives involving China/Russia.
There are a few users on Lemmy.ml who I see all over the place. Half their posts will just be funny “lol capitalism sucks, amirite?” memes and the other half will be “Look at how China is ushering the world into a golden age of social and economic progress” or “When will the west acknowledge Ukraine’s Nazi problem?”
I think it would absolutely make a difference.
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What do they do with these SIM cards?
From what I gather here in the comments, they use the sim cards to make the bots look like they’re actually posting from where the farm is located, since using a VPN would not be sufficient to hide their tracks.
Musk just lost 150K sycophants.
Russia has the last laugh since they confiscated 3 copies of The Sims 3.
I still can’t believe that happened
Context? Lol
recollecting from memory: Early in the war, russian news reported they busted a nazi hideout in the occupied donbass region. The report was accompanied by a picture of swastika flags, nazi tshirts, 3 copies of the “Sims 3” game and a document signed with “Illegible”. All layed out neatly on a bed.
Apparently, the instructions for staging the photo was to include Nazi paraphenalia, 3 SIM Cards and a document with an illegible signature. And someone didn’t read the instructions properly (or took them too literal), and instead used 3 copies of Sims 3, as well as a document signed with the name “illegible”
that is one of the more hilarious things ive heard out of this whole conflict of russia continually embarressing itself
https://www.vice.com/en/article/88gpmg/russia-sims-3
It almost makes less sense WITH context.
Before anyone asks, yes, russia really is that dumb.
Before anyone asks, yes, russia really is that dumb.
In the US, we have absolutely zero room to talk shit about other countries’ leaders doing stupid shit. We sat through 4 years of Trump.
why are these are being set up in Ukraine and not Russia? What do they gain from having them within reach of the Ukrainian police?
My guess is that it’d make it look like it were actual ukrainians spreading the disinfo, as the IP wouldn’t show russian addresses. Could also be that Ukraine is blocking internet traffic from Russia, so being there is a way to bypass the block.
I fully expect the assholes behind said farms to be safely within russian territory, so they’re just sighing and shrugging as having to set up a new base.
it’s so these accounts can believably pose as ukrainian
Couldn’t they set up a VPN / Proxy in Ukraine and have the actual bot farm run from within Russia.
If they did that it would be pretty easy to spot for anyone looking, all the bot accounts would be connecting through the same IP address(es). For it to be believable, you would need thousands of Ukrainian IP addresses, owned by Ukrainian internet providers. What Russia did is an effective way to achieve this. With thousands of sim cards on multiple Ukrainian mobile networks, the traffic is very hard to distinguish from real Ukrainian internet traffic. Of course the downside is that all the devices with those sim cards have to be in Ukraine for it to work. It’s also possible that at least some of these devices were essentially just acting as VPNs for more devices in Russia.
Daily comment to say fuck Russia
be interesting to see how much the usership of lemmygrad drops lol
(and the rest of lemmy)
Nah, lemmy is too small of a circlejerk to really be a target for these people. I don’t think instances require working phone numbers for account creation anyway.
bruh, if its small the troll farms have no problem outmassing real ppl
Yeah but if there aren’t enough eyeballs on the spam it doesn’t actually matter.
