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Russian and Chinese Bots Fueling Online ‘Violence’ After Charlie Kirk Shooting
(www.thedailybeast.com)
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this post was submitted on 12 Sep 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:
- No disinformation
- Posts must be relevant to the topic of astroturfing, propaganda and/or disinformation
Related websites
- EU vs Disinfo
- FactCheck.org
- PolitiFact
- Snopes
- Media Bias / Fact Check
- PEN America
- Media Matters
- FAIR
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Those bots have been so successful the past few years that if they shut them all down tomorrow, it wouldn't matter because they managed to radicalize enough idiots to keep it going.
They've actually studied this and found it not to be true. I'll look for the study later, but it said that if you cut off access to Fox News and Facebook, people get less racist and wanting to do harm.
Do they really? Or are they just less emboldened to verbalize their bigotry?
I suspect a surprising percentage of people just follow the crowd. No effort required to formulate any bigotry or predudice or whatever, just copy others and you're part of the gang. If there's nothing to copy they just shrink out of view.
If you stop exciting them they return to a low energy state
If one stops drinking alcohol, one stops being drunk.
I think people in groups acclimatize to the vibe of their surroundings and verbalize things in a nudged way to land well within the group. So if the group is toxic, the nudge will be toxic.
well actually, it actually stops thier momentum. case in point on reddit, when they were actually clean sweeping all the propaganda bot, the site remained extremely quiet for a few days of any astroturfing or "both sides" bs. yea it doesnt stop the violence, they just lose steam really quickly. the Right constantly need something to poke them into action.