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"far left"
Gotta sound balanced to be fair lmao
80% of political violence over the past 30 years is committed by far right activists, the majority of far left “violence” is ecoterrorism and focused on property (eg without human life lost/harmed), the far right took over the government and is literally doing fascism, but a “tankie” on lemmy was mean and said they wouldn’t vote for a democrat because they are ineffective for decades to the point of planned opposition and enable genocide just as much as the right. These are the same
The 80% number is only correct if you separately tally "islamist extremism", which is such a weird thing to do, as its mostly a different flavoured right-wing extremism. The actual number is over 90%
Yeah but the right wing would NEVER be grouped with MUSLIMS!! And so we let them control more shit just by complaining
I don’t think the post was a comment on political violence, but on the real issue of bot farms swaying public opinion.
The ring wing bot farms work by dog piling and being the first ones to conversations online. They set the narrative from the beginning and likely are the ones posting controversial content as well. The impact is that it sways the opinion of low information voters that maybe don’t tune in that often. The goal of these bots though is also to build conformity on the right.
The left wing bot farms work quite differently, from my experience. We on the left are more swayed by sympathy and empathy, so narrative sways us more. These bots push purity tests more than anything. They are preying on our kind hearts, because we will stand in solidarity with those who we hear have been wronged. The goal of these bots is to divide the left so that it may be conquered.
Frankly, I have issues with many of the Democrats in power Federally, but you’ll hear real people, like me, who are advocating for changing the voting system in my state. As changing the voting system will enable third parties to be able to win more, and so the ‘spoiler effect’ doesn’t happen allowing conservatives to win. I think doing ground work locally for third parties, to win city and statewide elections, would matter for pulling the US more left. However, the only way the US changes for the better is by showing up day-in and day-out to push for the positive changes you want to see.
Left wing bot farms are literally just right wing bots trying to divide the left and convince them not to vote. It is unfortunately very widespread in left wing spaces.
Where are the waves of "far left" bots? Twitter? Facebook?
.ml
Bots on .ml? Hardly seems worth anyone's effort to spam Lemmy.
I know but all those .ml users repeat the same Russian/Chinese propaganda.
I always found it funny that you have such a shock-value username, and yet such bland opinions.
I exist for your amusement.
Reddit and TikTok mostly; the Gen Z sub had quite a number popping up a few months before the 2024 election for instance.
This looks a lot like a QA lab I worked with that was doing automated testing and stress testing of multimedia stuff. Not saying it is for sure, just that propaganda is not the only purpose of having a lot of phones in one place.
It certainly is a possible use of them, but like others have mentioned, having actual physical phones seems unnecessary for that.
having actual physical phones seems unnecessary for that.
With the incorporation of e-sim, maybe? But my assumption is, if they are bots, they'll be need every possible way to seem like an authentic smartphone user from having different installed apps, advertising id, imei, browser fingerprint, app fingerprint, and one of the important variables is using cellular or residential IP addresses. That needs sim cards on each device. Then they're just automated from a computer.
You can probably fake some of these on a vm, but bigtech has tools to discern bots from users with a lot of tools and exploits. They also sometimes just allow it to seem there's more engagement and to prop up their user base.
Perhaps so. That does also make sense.
What is the purpose of using phones for this? Is it easier to make it look like the devices are unique if you actually use physical devices? I just always imagined that bot farms would be run on large servers, not phones.
Might be cheaper to buy old broken ewaste phones?
Also, they don’t use a lot of power.
Oh man, it'd be easy to hack a farm like this if they are using old phones.
Aren't there some social media services that are only accessible through an official mobile app now? I honestly don't know; this is the only one I use.
Although, to OP's point, I suppose emulation would be more efficient.
Used phones have actual human usage history associated with their hardware identifiers. If you were to use emulated devices with spoofed identifiers, it would be easier for the large social media services to filter out the bot traffic.
Using old devices that were once used by real people leaves a digital paper trail that makes it harder to make algorithms to filter out bots.
It is actually incredibly hard to create a perfect emulated environment that cannot be detected by the software running within it, in this case the official social media app the bots have to use. The apps of the social media platforms cannot really be fooled by an emulated environment. There are too many ways for it to check whether it is running on hardware or in a virtual machine or container.
Case in point ask anyone who has ever tried to use a graphics driver with windows in a virtual machine.
From a technical view I'd think it's the SIM cards. You register and authenicate basically everthing via mobile number. If you want your bots to look like real people to the automated gatekeepers you better have a legitimate number and connect via cellular
No way they're all using wireless in that small of a space, even if it's a mix of cellular and Wi-Fi. I'm betting the USB cable is supplying power and a LAN connection. Which makes me wonder if sites could look for cellphone devices using a wired connection as a dragnet to round up troll networks.
What are we looking at?
All the very real people on Reddit and such. You want 10,000 up doots in under 5 mins, just pay a small fee…. Short answer bot farm.
It's someone running a social media bot farm. Each one of those phones is being used to manipulate communities by posting content that's being sold as from a real human being.
There are far cheaper, easier, and more efficient ways to do that. Individual phones are not needed.
testing environments or ad fraud farm (my money on the latter)
Is this a bot farm?
No, this is patrick.
this post was submitted on 21 Sep 2025
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