According to the comments r/europe_sub and r/canada_sub might be involved as well.

  • @[email protected]
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    162 months ago

    Good evidence of astroturfing on Reddit. That Reddit took action and banned the Palantir agents only provides evidence that exposure of the op is the problem. Not evidence that Reddit acts in good faith.

    • @[email protected]
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      32 months ago

      Good evidence of astroturfing on Reddit. That Reddit took action and banned the Palantir agents only provides evidence that exposure of the op is the problem. Not evidence that Reddit acts in good faith.

      A good question to ask, is what would happen if Lemmy was the victim of astroturfing. It’s decentralized for starters and groups might not even reside in the same place on the fediverse. Also I expect Reddit has monitoring, analytics and tools that could flag behaviour rather than somebody having to go through logs trying to find patterns.

      I think Lemmy and other federated platforms have escaped having to deal with these issues simply because someone attempting to astroturf will do it on the biggest platform. So Lemmy escapes not by any technical or administrative virtue but by being smallfry.

      • @[email protected]
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        12 months ago

        Corporatism leads to imperialism by the need to seek profits in new markets. Wherever we see lots of defense of imperialism, there is corporate backing behind it. That’s why I think lemmy.world is astroturfed. There’s a strong anti-communist and pro “free market” capitalist tendency on there. Posts that attack the Global South as the world’s villains. On the other hand, there are also many people on lemmy.world that speak out against imperialism and capitalistic exploitation. But the recurrent waves of reactionary politics on lemmy.world indicate to me the presence of astroturfing trolls. This makes sense even on a relatively small platform like Lemmy because it threatens to become a nucleus for organizing against capitalism.

    • @[email protected]
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      12 months ago

      Put me in my place if this is nonsense but doesn’t it make way more sense if the astroturfing is done by WSB goons? I just don’t see corporate entities coordinating this kind of thing

      • @[email protected]
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        12 months ago

        The top hits for my “WSB” search are:

        • World Sports Betting

        • r/WallStreetBets

        • World Superbikes

        I don’t think any of their goons are astroturfing (well, maybe World Superbikes). Did you mean a different entity?

          • @[email protected]
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            2 months ago

            Do you mean investors are trying to manipulate stocks by planting stories? Yeah, I think so. But intelligence agencies have whole training programs on how to manipulate narratives, and a very long track record of doing so.

            See: Israel’s hasbara apparatus,

            GCHQ leaked documents on infiltrating and derailing socialist discussions,

            Church Committee Hearings,

            “The Cultural Cold War” by Frances Stonor Saunders.