I remember, back in 2016, when the /r/The_Donald website just used a bunch of bots and other fake accounts to juice their content to the front page week after week.
And then the Mods tweaked the algorithm so you wouldn’t have a wall of Trump memes on the front page every day. /r/The_Donald folks spilled into other sites and started repeating the strategy, so Mods had to tweak the algorithm again. And there was this back and forth that dragged all the way into the general election, at which point the Admins finally decided to ban the sub. But they also had to ban a slew of leftist subs, to make things fair.
And now we have Hexbear, a site composed of purged Reddit-fuges. But Reddit is still full of Trumpies, for some curious reason.
I’m not terribly against stealing money from maga dumb idiots with too much money.
Probably a scam, but congrats on discovering the Russian disinformation strategy from 2016.
the Russian disinformation strategy
I’ll never understand why people attribute to the Russian government what was in the obvious best-interests of the Republican Party and the conservative movement.
If you asked who owns and operates the FOX News Channel, or Sinclair Media, or Clear Channel Radio, or any of the other dozen right-wing propaganda projects, I have to wonder how many people would reflexively insist “Russia” despite all of the money spilling in from the UK, Australia, Canada, Wall Street, Silicon Valley, and the O&G Industry.
I’ll never understand why people attribute to the Russian government what was in the obvious best-interests of the Republican Party and the conservative movement.
Maybe because there was a demonstrated and provable coordinated effort by the Russian government in the 2016 election to get Trump elected? Look up project lakhta. Russian election interference and the efforts of the domestic conservative movement can (and do) exist simultaneously.
What do you have against attributing actions to the Russian government that are demonstrably attributable to the Russian government?
Because there have been literal articles and reports by the FBI that Russian interference in social media has been a thing since the 2016 election cycle.
That’s why it’s been attributed to the Russian government. Because the Russian government actually did a ton of stuff.
there have been literal articles and reports by the FBI that Russian interference
There have been literal articles and reports by the FBI of domestic white nationalist organizing and domestic financing. Significantly more money and manpower is documented as entirely domestically organized, although a sizeable amount is moving between NATO and other Five Eyes states. We’re talking on the scale of tens of billions moving between domestic financiers - like the Mercers, Thiel, the Kochs, etc - and domestic fascist media/organizing. That dwarfs Russian state interventions. Its orders of magnitude different.
That’s why it’s been attributed to the Russian government.
Why do you search for the speck in your neighbor’s eye when you have a plank within your own?
Not exactly a scam. I still browse Reddit, and the Jordan Peterson Memes sub has been popping up in Popular for a few weeks, it had been a completely obscure sub before. The posts are ALL about US politics too…on a meme sub for a Canadian ‘life coach’
Ender’s Game was prescient text, regardless of Orson Scott Card’s personal beliefs.
Locke and Demosthenes are now armies of manipulative bots (but often real humans), shaping political discourse throughout the world. The Internet gave mind control powers to people with money, ambition, or both. We saw it with the Bernie Sanders and Trump movements in 2016 on Reddit, all too clearly for those who lived through an era where bullshit detection was a critical skill.
I was once fairly defeatist on this subject: the bad guys won, got Trump elected, and kicked off a new era of 80s conservatism that demonized progressive values like environmental conservation, freedom of choice in a number of matters, and equality.
But now, I’m starting to see young people stand up to their boomer relatives at Thanksgiving and bring facts and logic to social media discussions. And I have regained some hope that we will once again find a way to make the progressive “line go up“. Our society seems to swing like a pendulum between the right and left, over decades, and it feels like the Trump era was a swing too violent for most of us. It’s time to swing back.
Subvert the will and desires of the majority using money and shitty practices…how very GOP of them.
Does anyone else feel like setting up a scam site that claims to sell upvotes, and donates all the profit to the Harris/Walz campaign?
That’s why you tell them to only post on subs that are already a chud circle jerk like here. They upvote him and you take the money. If they don’t just say the libs have a downvotes bot focused on only them and you need more money to DDOS it for Trump. They will appreciate how important they are. Like any scam, the end goal is to find egotistical idiots and this is rich soil.
