You guys can’t think there are seriously paid bots on lemmy. There are like 10,000 users. It’s basically a niche message board. Reddit is a valuable target because it has millions of users. Facebook, instagram, Twitter. These places are being astroturfed. But lemmy? I honestly don’t believe it. It doesn’t even have a core of users in any particular country. The small user base is spread all over the world. It just isn’t a target of these campaigns.
You in turn are overestimating how much effort is required for an established bot farm to add a platform to their system.
I used to see that shit decades ago in the phpBB days, you’d get accounts signing up to a board with 20 active users to post climate change denialist articles, even though the website itself had nothing to do with climate change. (Looking back on it now, the oil lobby was probably the first big user of internet forum astroturfing, but somehow nothing ever came of it…)
Exactly, it blew up exponentionally around 2016.
That’s when the US regime put Jessica Ashoosh in place.
All the clowns leaving Reddit bcs now with Trump ‘Reddit isn’t free’ are a joke.
They have been living a lie
JcbAzPx@lemmy.world 2 days ago
Lemmy is in a growth stage. That’s exactly the time groups would want to start embedding bots to give them the most possible credulity for when they’re needed.
conicalscientist@lemmy.world 2 days ago
This is exactly how voat died. There may have been an ounce of legitimacy early on. It veer into blatant far right accounts posting every top post. It’s obvious this kind of thing happens on lemmy too. Especially on certain instances. For now at least the federation model appears to be doing its thing.
phx@lemmy.ca 2 days ago
It’ll be interesting too as federations are a bit of a wild-west right now with some domains dropping off or being federated, while others may still be created in the future