The vast majority of bots, and it’s more accurate to say influence operations as real people direct fake accounts with bots, and now chatbots, sophisticated ones for some issues, are working for commercial interests. Trade groups of all types. Any toxic chemical they use has keywords scramble a response to any mention of it. Real agents cycling through accounts backed by bots. AI, actually Indians, in many cases, as they’ve good english and can work for cheaper.
But the State Actors are getting worse, the US aligned ones exploded in number and visibility after the Venezuela operation I noticed. I’m sure the build up to the next forever war with Iran because Israel first has armies of bots. I’ve seen some influence operations on lemmy here in regards to that reddit must be overrun by it.
ageedizzle@piefed.ca 3 weeks ago
Well yeah, and Ghislaine Maxwell was also a Reddit power mod (mod or r/news and apparently some other big subreddits too).
reabsorbthelight@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
Seems to be unproven factually.co/…/was-ghislaine-maxwell-a-reddit-mod…
Could be true, but this suggests weak evidence.
Khari@feddit.org 3 weeks ago
The evidence in favor is circumstantial. The account stopped posting when Maxwell was arrested. On the other hand, I cannot find the mentioned screencap from /u/Hasharin cited by Vice and Factually, in which they had a recent conversation with MaxwellHill. The screencap was mentioned in a different article in 2024. It would be really surprising if it were recent, because the account has been inactive for so long. Hasharin has mentioned the theory in three recent replies to a thread. I thought I would get a firm opinion by looking into it, but the refutation was not very specific either.