“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.
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.
Where are the waves of “far left” bots? Twitter? Facebook?
There are not. Only accounts pretending to be left to mislead leftists. I was wondering whether it was worth the trouble explaining this to the preceding commenter or not.
Believe it or not, George Soros does not employ bot farms. The United States and Israel do, Russia does, a myriad of financial interests do, political groups. I don’t think there is a single left-wing anything that does.
To be clear there are far-left bots, they are just funded by far-right organizations and used to stir shit
Far-right false flag bots and far-left bots aren’t the same thing. They aren’t promoting leftist positions; they’re promoting a caricatured strawman of leftist positions.
Ha ha, I know, They’re not working for the left wing or four causes, they are looking to as you say stir up shit, make left-wing people look bad, and often to reduce turnout, which is an all too easy sell given how much the Democrats suck
You could replace Democrats with the left Center option of almost any Western Country here. They will all fall like dominoes if we do not get a viable reform alternative. Don’t fool yourselves, Russia and the United States will be helping behind the scenes to get their own right-wing hacks in to put a permanent fix in on elections just as they’re planning on doing here. A fix on elections, on the media, preventing any criticism, there is no bottom to this.
The best way to get a viable reform off the ground is by promoting an alternative voting system. As it stands, the current system in the US creates two-party system.
In the United States voting is done at the state level. As such this is something many of us are working on, many of us have voters sponsored ballot initiatives where enough votes can get an issue on a ballot for an up or down vote, it is how we legalize marijuana. Anyway we have one of those coming up here in Michigan and other states for ranked Choice voting.
The United States is a shit show though, too little too late I fear.
I hope it will matter; I agree, this is something that should have happened decades ago really.
I believe it is still worth pursuing on the off chance that the right somehow fumbles their plans again like they did in 2020.
I actually think we could take the country in 2028 if we organized. Outside of traditional social media, maybe on some new Federated social media not run by douchebags which may or may not control many of these forums. With a slate of populist candidates offering real reform, a new deal, we could trounce whomever is going to replace the president in the next election. But after that? The fix will be in completely. The fix is already in in many ways but we could still overcome it with an overwhelmingly popular mandate. Not with Gavin newsom.
I’m still sceptical. I mean, I’m not on twitter/FB/Instagram, but I find it hard to believe there’s much in the way of “leftism” (organic or not) represented there. I also do think there are probably “centrist” bots as well. There’s definitely paid “centrist” influencers.
It’s not America funding the left leaning ones; China and Russia are a couple countries funding the far-leftist bots I believe. Although probably more the former than the latter.
They’re mostly on TikTok and Reddit, although I wouldn’t be surprised if there are some on Lemmy.
.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.
How big was the gen z sub?
Pretty popular at the time, as posts were getting tens of thousands of upvotes. So the view-to-vote ratio must have been fairly high. The thing was, the bots everywhere. They were in every thread and were in subs that were not specifically centered on politics. By no means was every bot was a left-wing bot, mind you, as most were right-wing bots. However, there was a notable style of commenting from the bots.
The Gen Z sub tanked in its popularity over the month after the election as well, especially given so many right-wing bots absolutely polluted the sub at that time. Shit was so toxic to be around.
I was off of reddit well before then. I never spent any time in the gen z sub, but was there when CTH got banned.
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.
cheaper? people give them in for free on the ‘promise’ of a monthly payment contract for a new over-priced one.
Free is typically cheaper, yeah.
damn. TIL.
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.
You are assuming social media wants to get rid of these influence operations. Not only do they not want powerful enemies in the case of many of them, they do not want the decrease in traffic. Inauthentic behavior is like over half of everything.
Only the ones they cannot ignore that are disfavored will get canceled at all. In fact they could notice influence operations are targeting you, a real user with mass flagging, and they would be more likely to violate you than that influence operation depending on whom it was.
Nothing porksnort said implied social media wanted total elimination of the bot networks. The methods listed are accurate ways they will stop unwanted traffic.
Social media has no incentive to get rid of the networks or slow them down. And they do not.
Like half the population of this site exists because Reddit locked down their API. It’s an empirical fact that they engage in bot detection and prevention. Anyone who consistently uses a VPN will have personal experience with it. Anyone who’s tried to interact with a social media’s API can tell you that. Try to write a bot that scrapes Facebook events or LinkedIn profiles before you speak in such absolutes.
You are correct that they don’t aim to completely eliminate them. They might even explicitly allow some of them. But If they didn’t engage in any bot management you’d see nothing but spam for “hot 21yos in your area” on every site. Depending on the platform they might offer paid API access to facilitate those influence networks (eg X.com blue checks). Even if they did that they’d engage in bot prevention for bots that aren’t paying.
Connected influence ops are given free reign, absolutely. Big money to polits.
If I can spot them they can, and they choose not to shut them down, even as those ops abuse actual people in bullying them away from reality and use the system to get the real users violated, mass flagging and whatnot.
You are writing like they’re involved in good faith efforts to stop inauthentic behavior and that is just laughable. Completely false as well.
Connected influence ops are given free reign, absolutely. Big money to polits.
If I can spot them they can, and they choose not to shut them down, even as those ops abuse actual people in bullying them away from reality and use the system to get the real users violated, mass flagging and whatnot.
You are writing like they’re involved in good faith efforts to stop inauthentic behavior and that is just laughable. Completely false as well.
Connected influence ops are given free reign, absolutely. Big money to polits.
If I can spot them they can, and they choose not to shut them down, even as those ops abuse actual people in bullying them away from reality and use the system to get the real users violated, mass flagging and whatnot.
You are writing like they’re involved in good faith efforts to stop inauthentic behavior and that is just laughable. Completely false as well.
Yeah they absolutely have a motive to get rid of some kinds of bots: spam
I’m not assuming any of that. The social media companies do monitor for bots and influence operations. Just because they let some keep operating doesn’t change the technical reason for using actual phones vs emulators.
It is both cat and mouse AND kabuki theater.
Seeing as I without any tools or information in able to spot influence operations left and right operating in Broad daylight, often in arrogant impunity of the actual rules and abusing real users trying to stand up for reality, I know the social media companies with all of their tools and all the data can see these influence operations.
Any they remove or restrict would be the exception not the rule. As I said, why would they? It makes their advertising more valuable, all of society is based on lies at this point. Nothing matters outside of their own self-advancement. No matter the harm that results. Millions of people going to be thrown into concentration camps and exterminated? Tough shit. Apparently.
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.
