this post was submitted on 30 Dec 2024
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Asklemmy
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My guess: (pure speculation)
Lemmy (edit: I mean the comment section) is probably at 25% government agents or people acting on behalf of governments including US, Russia, China, possibly other allies of the aforementioned.
Bots tho, probably few, maybe 10% or less. Most of the instances use manual applications, so hard to get bots through. You'd need to write a different "essay" for each application, also think of unique names that doesnt look bot generated.
If you look specifically in (edit: the comments section of) political threads, probably anywhere from 25% to 50% government agents.
Mainsteam social media like Reddit, probably at 25% to 50% bots pre-exodus, now it seem like 50% to 75% bots, the percentage of government agents are probably much lower, since unlike Lemmy where there are much less users, on reddit they wouldn't have the manpower to post enough comments to manipulate the discussion, but they could just use bots instead, many of those bots are probably operated by governments. And on political subreddits, these numbers will skyrocket.
Thing thing about the internet, is you have to treat it as entertainment, not real source of unbiased information, especially not a forum where any rando can sign up.
I'm gonna restate what I said in another thread:
::: spoiler
I’ve come up with a system to categorize reality in different ways:
Category 1: Thoughts inside my brain formed by logics
Category 2: Things I can directly observe via vision, hearing, or other direct sensory input
Category 3: IRL Other people’s words, stories, anecdotes, in face to face conversations
Category 4: Acredited News Media, Television, Newspaper, Radio (Including Amateur Radio Conversations), Telephone, Telegrams, etc…
Category 5: The Internet
The higher the category number, means the more distant that information is, and therefore more suspicious I am.
I mean like, if a user on Reddit (or any internet fourm or social media for that matter) told me X is a valid treatment for X disease without like real evidence, I’m gonna laugh in their face (well not their face, since its a forum, but you get the idea). :::
Come on: Lemmy isn’t nearly big enough for state actors to bother with—yet. In the social media space, Lemmy is a rounding error.
The military-intelligence-industrial complex is aware of the fediverse’s existence, though:
Atlantic Council » Collective Security in a Federated World (PDF)
If it's big enough for us, it's big enough for state actors. They may not be putting in a ton of effort yet, but I'm sure they're here.
it mostly seems to be US so far... How .world handled the dead CEO story was very telling who their handlers are.
Hilarious, and no. Turns out we're all "handled" by legal authorities.
Most of our communities have different mods. Some were a bit overzealous at first (imo). It seems the whole instance doesn't get much credit for avoiding the Reddit supermod situation and instead the whole instance is judged by whichever mod each user each dislikes the most.
I mean more like comments, not the total users. Total user at 25% would be a lot of man power.
Like a post with 25 comments could have at least 7 comments be a government account, and it doesn't take a lot of people. One new NSA or FSB hire can run 7 virtual machines to create Lemmy sockpuppet accounts to push whatever they want. Like... it only takes 1 out of the thousands of employees they have to run this. Lemmy is small enough to be doable.
I mean, if I wanted to troll, I could pull up 7 tor browser sessions and create accounts to post bad faith arguments, but I just don't have the energy for it.
It certainly can be done, and without much effort, but there’s virtually no bang for that buck right now, because the audience is laughably small.