I always wonder if Russia would collapse, if suddenly a lot of the disinfo & hate on various online media would become noticeably quieter.
World News
A community for discussing events around the World
Rules:
-
Rule 1: posts have the following requirements:
- Post news articles only
- Video links are NOT articles and will be removed.
- Title must match the article headline
- Not United States Internal News
- Recent (Past 30 Days)
- Screenshots/links to other social media sites (Twitter/X/Facebook/Youtube/reddit, etc.) are explicitly forbidden, as are link shorteners.
-
Rule 2: Do not copy the entire article into your post. The key points in 1-2 paragraphs is allowed (even encouraged!), but large segments of articles posted in the body will result in the post being removed. If you have to stop and think "Is this fair use?", it probably isn't. Archive links, especially the ones created on link submission, are absolutely allowed but those that avoid paywalls are not.
-
Rule 3: Opinions articles, or Articles based on misinformation/propaganda may be removed. Sources that have a Low or Very Low factual reporting rating or MBFC Credibility Rating may be removed.
-
Rule 4: Posts or comments that are homophobic, transphobic, racist, sexist, anti-religious, or ableist will be removed. “Ironic” prejudice is just prejudiced.
-
Posts and comments must abide by the lemmy.world terms of service UPDATED AS OF 10/19
-
Rule 5: Keep it civil. It's OK to say the subject of an article is behaving like a (pejorative, pejorative). It's NOT OK to say another USER is (pejorative). Strong language is fine, just not directed at other members. Engage in good-faith and with respect! This includes accusing another user of being a bot or paid actor. Trolling is uncivil and is grounds for removal and/or a community ban.
Similarly, if you see posts along these lines, do not engage. Report them, block them, and live a happier life than they do. We see too many slapfights that boil down to "Mom! He's bugging me!" and "I'm not touching you!" Going forward, slapfights will result in removed comments and temp bans to cool off.
-
Rule 6: Memes, spam, other low effort posting, reposts, misinformation, advocating violence, off-topic, trolling, offensive, regarding the moderators or meta in content may be removed at any time.
-
Rule 7: We didn't USED to need a rule about how many posts one could make in a day, then someone posted NINETEEN articles in a single day. Not comments, FULL ARTICLES. If you're posting more than say, 10 or so, consider going outside and touching grass. We reserve the right to limit over-posting so a single user does not dominate the front page.
We ask that the users report any comment or post that violate the rules, to use critical thinking when reading, posting or commenting. Users that post off-topic spam, advocate violence, have multiple comments or posts removed, weaponize reports or violate the code of conduct will be banned.
All posts and comments will be reviewed on a case-by-case basis. This means that some content that violates the rules may be allowed, while other content that does not violate the rules may be removed. The moderators retain the right to remove any content and ban users.
Lemmy World Partners
News !news@lemmy.world
Politics !politics@lemmy.world
World Politics !globalpolitics@lemmy.world
Recommendations
For Firefox users, there is media bias / propaganda / fact check plugin.
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/media-bias-fact-check/
- Consider including the article’s mediabiasfactcheck.com/ link
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?
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.
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
We actually did see this at the start of the war. When Russia was dealing with the new sanction and shifting focus from the west to Ukraine.
Probably. They've managed use throughput using bots, but if the government collapsed the bit farms would stop receiving funding, and the entire project would either wither away or be wiped away by a new state trying to replace the instruments of the old.
Russia has the last laugh since they confiscated 3 copies of The Sims 3.
Lemmygrad just lost half of its users.
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"
Iirc the illegible signature part was debunked as it was a reference to some nazi group whose signature was "illegible" (don't quote me on that, i'm recollecting from memory). But the Sims 3 cards was at some NotTheOnion levels of ridiculousness.
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.
Ukraine will never recover from that crushing blow. Without The Sims 3, those 3 soldiers will surely turn against Zelensky.
Hopefully the conservative channels get quite a bit.
How does this have negative three comments??
Looks like a bug! For me, from lemmy.world's web interface, it is -1 as of this posting.
As the saying goes, there are two fundamentally difficult things about programming:
- cache coherence
- coming up with good names for things
- off-by-one errors
Negative comment counts are likely caused by the latter.
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.
Better infrastructure and access to tech would be my guess
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.
That's a million in SIM cards. And then people still go and mock anyone who dares suggest that troll factories are present in discussions.
I'd be interested in seeing exactly what messages this farm was putting out. Lists of accounts and what networks they primarily operated on would also be very interesting.
I saw on yahoo about pringles being in Belarus a comment about how Pringles was killing “Nazzis” in Ukraine. Makes we wonder if that shit was from Russia