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With a tip of the keyboard to a certain someone who has blocked me and won't see this (a shame really):
Since many in this community have a habit of resorting to personal attacks when responding to posts recently, I’ll say this: I support and respect everyone’s right to vote for who they want to. Just as I support the ability of anyone to point out to someone the consequences of their actions. ;)
I’m just posting this article that’s already available on a much bigger platform than Lemmy—I didn’t write it, just sharing it for discussion.
What this? Oh just Jill Stein enjoying dinner with known traitor Mike Flynn and the guy who wants Democracy destroyed and Trump in office— Pootie.
https://www.nbcnews.com/news/amp/ncna742696
Yep, she's the greenwashing candidate who comes out every four years to collect a paycheck and espouse Libertarianism. An absolute grifter.
Lol I love it. It's almost a badge of honor to be blocked by that user. They seem to want to be aware of people countering their troll campaign so they can bait those people into saying something that will get them banned. So you really must have upset them to get blocked.
I did the math last night. On average they've posted or commented about every twenty minutes, assuming they sleep 8 hours a day, since they created their account a month ago. Posting at this rate, almost entirely in favor of third parties. Hmmm.. I wonder why. They don't give a shit about third parties; only about keeping Democrats from getting votes.
Oh, I saw the numbers! That was terrific that you pulled that together!
And yeah, their history shows that they’re either chronically and desperately online (sort of sad actually) or posting like they’re getting paid for it. I don’t envy the mods for having to deal with all the chaos that user causes, but the user is almost preternaturally good at threading the needle of the rules.
Luckily the election will be done in less than two months and then I have to guess we won’t seem them again for another four years ;)
Lol they just banned me from their super legitimate "socialism" community because they wanted to keep tabs on me but not be countered in public as much.
Ha! Congrats!
Yeah I agree with all of this. I do think it's a shame though that the rules are all they will go on. There ought to be some algorithm for determining likelihood of trolling. This dude would definitely be way over the threshold of any such algorithm that was worth a damn.
With all the news about the Russian campaign with influencers, I had to wonder if the Feds are even aware enough of the Fediverse to even begin to look at what’s happening here. We certainly know state sponsored misinformation campaigns are active and in place and targeting folks who are disaffected for a variety of reasons, so if Russia and China had networks specifically targeting various corners of the Fediverse, I wouldn’t be surprised at all. Theoretically we’re a much richer ground for them than corpo-sponsored sites filled with normies (which we now have proof they’re already active with).
In an election where the margin of victory in some states will be on the scale of a few thousand (or maybe even hundreds), it would seem a likely strategy.
Yeah I definitely think you are onto something. The audience is much smaller but the advantage is that a lot of people here really are so left they despise Democrats and would probably be easier to convince not to vote than your typical Democratic voter. Trolling campaigns here would have a much more concentrated target audience. They already know they don't need to convince conservatives on mainstream social media.
And not one post about efforts to advance alternative voting systems.
It's worse, if you try to suggest that the problem is the system they'll instead blame anything else.
Which user? Sorry I'm out of the loop
Hey, you never need to apologize for sharing news unless it's fabricated - some people may downvote articles they disagree with but most of us just appreciate the folks that find stories to share.
They are being facetious because the user they mentioned constantly posts in favor of third party candidates and had taken to writing a bizarre disclaimer like this to essentially troll the many users they're pissing off with their behavior
I can take a pretty educated guess as to who that is. You're not wrong for posting this in the slightest.
These shenanigans are the exact type of bullshit that shows the U.S. is a failed democracy, and is in need of severe election reform. That goes for the form of financial reform, switching to more representative types of voting like approval voting, measures taken to make gerrymandering impossible, etc.
The irony in my discussions with that other user is that I wholeheartedly agree we need viable third parties. And to your point, we desperately need election reform. But their willful ignorance of the fact we need to put out the house fire before we start discussing changes to building codes is the kicker.
The sad thing is that all the current third party candidates are useful idiots and not viable alternatives. And with democracy literally on the line, there’s not any real option other than acting like an adult and casting a ballot for the only option that moves us forward. And then the day after Election Day, start doing the real work to fix this for every Election Day thereafter.
You're being too generous by thinking they give two shits about third parties. That's just the angle they've chosen for Lemmy.
Oh, I have my suspicions about their motivations but I’ll give them the benefit of the doubt that they’re coming from a genuine but terribly misguided point of view. Sort of Hanlon’s razor :) Like many of the third party candidates they so fervently support (not even sure who they’re voting for now, it seems to change frequently), they don’t need to be knowingly in on the con to still be useful - and perhaps more useful to certain parties if they are unaware.
Yeah. I mean, them posting every 20 minutes starting 3 months before the election thing, despite getting constant pushback, makes me feel quite justified in my conclusion. Normal people just simply would never do what they're doing. Their motivation could be something else. But whatever it is, the behavior is very unhealthy and suspect.
In posts that user has given different replies to the same comment of mine multiple times, minutes apart, seemingly unaware they were doing so. Sus to me.
Back when twitter was a thing, for my rep had a social media 'minion' army that managed propaganda accounts, multiple people per account to pretend to be voters with 'concerns' about Dems. This felt the same.
They've done that to me too. They accuse me of stalking them sometimes too, seeming excited to do so, so I feel like they do that to a lot of people but it's hard to keep track of who is who for them
I have to be extremely careful with my words here since calling someone a troll is against the rules, and the user has also shown he's very happy to report even the slightest perceived rules violation.
I think the agenda hypothesis is possible, but I'm getting more and more convinced he's doing what he is doing because it gives him some sort of pleasure. I think he enjoys getting people to argue with him. I think he enjoys knowingly dancing around the letter of the law whilst ignoring its spirit - gleefully reminding others to "please be civil". I think he enjoys getting others to lash out and subsequently reporting them.
That's what I think their motivation is.
You might be right that this is all their motivation is, but the timing and singular topic of interest is far too suspicious for me to ignore. I mean they definitely take pleasure in being a deranged hall monitor, though, don't get me wrong.
As for accusing them of being a troll... We are simply discussing a hypothetical user. No one has mentioned any username. No rules broken here!
Could be suspicious activity for sure, but then again think about it this way: what better time and angle of attack to choose if you're looking to get people on the internet riled up?
It’s insane. It’s like trying to debate a wall. At this point, I’ve resigned myself to just trying to counter the wrongheaded arguments if I don’t see anyone else doing so.
sounds like I had the exact same conversation with this person not long ago.
So many of us have - it’s sort of amazing. It doesn’t help that they often copy and paste common responses to different people, so in some cases the conversation is pretty much the same verbatim on their end.
As I said yesterday, I can't believe he is not banned yet. Repeatedly claiming that he doesn't care about the spoiler effect because he "doesn't believe in it" and copy-pasting long (often unrelated) walls of text at people verbatim sounds to me like multiple violations of the "good faith discussion" rule.
Yeah, there are several ways I think they are violating rules. Copy pasting long walls of text should be an open and shut case of spam, for one.
It's almost like they have an agenda.
You've read my mind.
If your second paragraph is implicating who I'm thinking since you're basically using a direct quote of theirs, then I'm not at all surprised by them blocking you. They love to take quotes out of context or ignore half of a quote for their own benefit. I love that you're directly calling them out. Good on you for actually knowing how our election system works.
Oh lord, don’t normalize this drivel.
I don’t believe anyone else will do it, but based on the article, I couldn’t help but be a bit cheeky this once.
Haha I thought it was pretty funny