spooky2092

@spooky2092@lemmy.blahaj.zone

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨POV: You're too shy to tell the medical staff that you just woke up during surgery.⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago⁩:

  General anesthesia in a C-section means there’s some kind of emergency on the mother’s end, and once the drugs are administered the surgery needs to be done FAST because they can effect the baby.

  Yeah… its a scary af time. Especially since the general can take a long time to wear off and the mother stabilize.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Microsoft employee disrupts 50th anniversary and calls AI boss ‘war profiteer’⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago⁩:

  Holy shit, I remember playing NationStates as a youngling, and I think I read the book too? Idk, it’s been 20 years.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Microsoft employee disrupts 50th anniversary and calls AI boss ‘war profiteer’⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago⁩:

  (continued)

  China is joining in with AI

  Last month, the New York Times reported on a new disinformation campaign. “Spamouflage” is an effort by China to divide Americans by combining AI with real images of the United States to exacerbate political and social tensions in the U.S. The goal appears to be to cause Americans to lose hope, by promoting exaggerated stories with fabricated photos about homeless violence and the risk of civil war.

  As Ladislav Bittman, a former Czechoslovakian secret police operative, explained about Soviet disinformation, the strategy is not to invent something totally fake. Rather, it is to act like an evil doctor who expertly diagnoses the patient’s vulnerabilities and exploits them, “prolongs his illness and speeds him to an early grave instead of curing him.”

  The influence networks are vastly more effective than platforms admit

  Russia now runs its most sophisticated online influence efforts through a network called Fabrika. Fabrika’s operators have bragged that social media platforms catch only 1% of their fake accounts across YouTube, Twitter, TikTok, and Telegram, and other platforms.

  But how effective are these efforts? By 2020, Facebook’s most popular pages for Christian and Black American content were run by Eastern European troll farms tied to the Kremlin. And Russia doesn’t just target angry Boomers on Facebook. Russian trolls are enormously active on Twitter. And, even, on Reddit.

  It’s not just false facts

  The term “disinformation” undersells the problem. Because much of Russia’s social media activity is not trying to spread fake news. Instead, the goal is to divide and conquer by making Western audiences depressed and extreme.

  Sometimes, through brigading and trolling. Other times, by posting hyper-negative or extremist posts or opinions about the U.S. the West over and over, until readers assume that’s how most people feel. And sometimes, by using trolls to disrupt threads that advance Western unity.

  As the RAND think tank explained, the Russian strategy is volume and repetition, from numerous accounts, to overwhelm real social media users and create the appearance that everyone disagrees with, or even hates, them. And it’s not just low-quality bots. Per RAND,

  Russian propaganda is produced in incredibly large volumes and is broadcast or otherwise distributed via a large number of channels. … According to a former paid Russian Internet troll, the trolls are on duty 24 hours a day, in 12-hour shifts, and each has a daily quota of 135 posted comments of at least 200 characters.

  What this means for you

  You are being targeted by a sophisticated PR campaign meant to make you more resentful, bitter, and depressed. It’s not just disinformation; it’s also real-life human writers and advanced bot networks working hard to shift the conversation to the most negative and divisive topics and opinions.

  It’s why some topics seem to go from non-issues to constant controversy and discussion, with no clear reason, across social media platforms. And a lot of those trolls are actual, “professional” writers whose job is to sound real.

  So what can you do? To quote WarGames: The only winning move is not to play. The reality is that you cannot distinguish disinformation accounts from real social media users. Unless you know whom you’re talking to, there is a genuine chance that the post, tweet, or comment you are reading is an attempt to manipulate you – politically or emotionally.

  Here are some thoughts:

  • Don’t accept facts from social media accounts you don’t know. Russian, Chinese, and other manipulation efforts are not uniform. Some will make deranged claims, but others will tell half-truths. Or they’ll spin facts about a complicated subject, be it the war in Ukraine or loneliness in young men, to give you a warped view of reality and spread division in the West.

  • Resist groupthink. A key element of manipulate networks is volume. People are naturally inclined to believe statements that have broad support. When a post gets 5,000 upvotes, it’s easy to think the crowd is right. But “the crowd” could be fake accounts, and even if they’re not, the brilliance of government manipulation campaigns is that they say things people are already predisposed to think. They’ll tell conservative audiences something misleading about a Democrat, or make up a lie about Republicans that catches fire on a liberal server or subreddit.

  • Don’t let social media warp your view of society. This is harder than it seems, but you need to accept that the facts – and the opinions – you see across social media are not reliable. If you want the news, do what everyone online says not to: look at serious, mainstream media. It is not always right. Sometimes, it screws up. But social media narratives are heavily manipulated by networks whose job is to ensure you are deceived, angry, and divided.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Microsoft employee disrupts 50th anniversary and calls AI boss ‘war profiteer’⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago⁩:

  Copying their post over (with minimal formatting, unfortunately) for anyone that doesn’t care to go to that site (and to make sure it doesn’t randomly disappear)

  r/self 5 mo. ago walkandtalkk You’re being targeted by disinformation networks that are vastly more effective than you realize. And they’re making you more hateful and depressed.

  (I wrote this post in March and posted it on r/GenZ. However, a few people messaged me to say that the r/GenZ moderators took it down last week, though I’m not sure why. Given the flood of divisive, gender-war posts we’ve seen in the past five days, and several countries’ demonstrated use of gender-war propaganda to fuel political division in multiple countries, I felt it was important to repost this. This post was written for a U.S. audience, but the implications are increasingly global.)

  TL;DR: You know that Russia and other governments try to manipulate people online. But you almost certainly don’t how just how effectively orchestrated influence networks are using social media platforms to make you – individually-- angry, depressed, and hateful toward each other. Those networks’ goal is simple: to cause Americans and other Westerners – especially young ones – to give up on social cohesion and to give up on learning the truth, so that Western countries lack the will to stand up to authoritarians and extremists.

  And you probably don’t realize how well it’s working on you.

  This is a long post, but I wrote it because this problem is real, and it’s much scarier than you think.

  How Russian networks fuel racial and gender wars to make Americans fight one another

  In September 2018, a video went viral after being posted by In the Now, a social media news channel. It featured a feminist activist pouring bleach on a male subway passenger for manspreading. It got instant attention, with millions of views and wide social media outrage. Reddit users wrote that it had turned them against feminism.

  There was one problem: The video was staged. And In the Now, which publicized it, is a subsidiary of RT, formerly Russia Today, the Kremlin TV channel aimed at foreign, English-speaking audiences.

  As an MIT study found in 2019, Russia’s online influence networks reached 140 million Americans every month – the majority of U.S. social media users.

  Russia began using troll farms a decade ago to incite gender and racial divisions in the United States

  In 2013, Yevgeny Prigozhin, a confidante of Vladimir Putin, founded the Internet Research Agency (the IRA) in St. Petersburg. It was the Russian government’s first coordinated facility to disrupt U.S. society and politics through social media.

  Here’s what Prigozhin had to say about the IRA’s efforts to disrupt the 2022 election:

  >Gentlemen, we interfered, we interfere and we will interfere. Carefully, precisely, surgically and in our own way, as we know how. During our pinpoint operations, we will remove both kidneys and the liver at once.
  

  In 2014, the IRA and other Russian networks began establishing fake U.S. activist groups on social media. By 2015, hundreds of English-speaking young Russians worked at the IRA. Their assignment was to use those false social-media accounts, especially on Facebook and Twitter – but also on Reddit, Tumblr, 9gag, and other platforms – to aggressively spread conspiracy theories and mocking, ad hominem arguments that incite American users.

  In 2017, U.S. intelligence found that Blacktivist, a Facebook and Twitter group with more followers than the official Black Lives Matter movement, was operated by Russia. Blacktivist regularly attacked America as racist and urged black users to rejected major candidates. On November 2, 2016, just before the 2016 election, Blacktivist’s Twitter urged Black Americans: “Choose peace and vote for Jill Stein. Trust me, it’s not a wasted vote.”

  Russia plays both sides – on gender, race, and religion

  The brilliance of the Russian influence campaign is that it convinces Americans to attack each other, worsening both misandry and misogyny, mutual racial hatred, and extreme antisemitism and Islamophobia. In short, it’s not just an effort to boost the right wing; it’s an effort to radicalize everybody.

  Russia uses its trolling networks to aggressively attack men. According to MIT, in 2019, the most popular Black-oriented Facebook page was the charmingly named “My Baby Daddy Aint Shit.” It regularly posts memes attacking Black men and government welfare workers. It serves two purposes: Make poor black women hate men, and goad black men into flame wars.

  MIT found that My Baby Daddy is run by a large troll network in Eastern Europe likely financed by Russia.

  But Russian influence networks are also also aggressively misogynistic and aggressively anti-LGBT.

  On January 23, 2017, just after the first Women’s March, the New York Times found that the Internet Research Agency began a coordinated attack on the movement. Per the Times:

  >More than 4,000 miles away, organizations linked to the Russian government had assigned teams to the Women’s March. At desks in bland offices in St. Petersburg, using models derived from advertising and public relations, copywriters were testing out social media messages critical of the Women’s March movement, adopting the personas of fictional Americans.
  
  >They posted as Black women critical of white feminism, conservative women who felt excluded, and men who mocked participants as hairy-legged whiners.
  

  But the Russian PR teams realized that one attack worked better than the rest: They accused its co-founder, Arab American Linda Sarsour, of being an antisemite. Over the next 18 months, at least 152 Russian accounts regularly attacked Sarsour. That may not seem like many accounts, but it worked: They drove the Women’s March movement into disarray and eventually crippled the organization.

  Russia doesn’t need a million accounts, or even that many likes or upvotes. It just needs to get enough attention that actual Western users begin amplifying its content.

  A former federal prosecutor who investigated the Russian disinformation effort summarized it like this:

  >It wasn’t exclusively about Trump and Clinton anymore.  It was deeper and more sinister and more diffuse in its focus on exploiting divisions within society on any number of different levels.
  

  As the New York Times reported in 2022,

  >There was a routine: Arriving for a shift, [Russian disinformation] workers would scan news outlets on the ideological fringes, far left and far right, mining for extreme content that they could publish and amplify on the platforms, feeding extreme views into mainstream conversations.
  

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Maybe it's just a human thing.⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago⁩:

  Christian faith that only exists in church is a false faith

  They’re probably going for how the religion is not what it’s supposed to be.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Clean butt⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago⁩:

  Do people not use the shelf for their comics and snacks?

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Clean butt⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago⁩:

  Lol, maybe in a shit (pun intended) bidet. Mine is mounted under the toilet seat and self cleans before and after spraying. Also, I can have it set to hit my butthole instead of trying to plains aim and spraying water and shit where it doesn’t need to be.

  Plus, mine has heated water, so I don’t feel like I’m gonna get frostbite on my butthole in the dead of winter.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Clean butt⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago⁩:

  I like to waggle my butt in the stream to make sure I get everything clean.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Clean butt⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago⁩:

  You can find a decent one with heated seat/water/fan for not much more than that. I spent a bit over 100$ for mine, and I love it. We had to RMA it within 6 months because the heater died, but it’s been rocking for like 1.5 years since then without issue.

  Worth every penny. Especially in the middle of winter.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Clean butt⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago⁩:

  It took one of my partners having surgery before they agreed to let me install a bidet. Never have I been so happy to strut around and say “I told you so” once they both tried it and realized bidets are awesome.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Note: before tariffs⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago⁩:

  When did VP Couch Fucker do game streaming?

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Note: before tariffs⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago⁩:

  Has there been a better ass Creed game than Black flag?

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨BDS calls for boycott of Microsoft and Xbox gaming products over alleged Israeli military connections⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  Wow, what MBA thought that was a cool look?

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Based on a true story⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  You have the option of not buying one if you cant afford it.

  Not really, depending on where you are.

  When I was barely above broke out of college, I had to buy a shit box just to be able to go to work, because the only job I could find in my field was >20 mi from where I lived and had no public transit options that wouldn’t add an hour of walking on top of how long the bus ride took. And that’s assuming clear weather, which we get for maaaaaybe half the year. I don’t know about you, but I’m not about walking for an hour in the blistering cold with spotty sidewalks in busy areas

  So, while I could take the option of not buying a car, it would turn a <30 min commute into 2-3 hours one way on a good day. Buying a car was the only way not to lose >25 hours a week on work transportation alone.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨If you're still on Reddit...⁩ ⁨⁨6⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  Have you heard of FetLife? Sounds like it might be what you’re looking for.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Just received a very special DM⁩ ⁨⁨6⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  I can’t ever report the spam, it always says that I’ve already reported them

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨We are so cooked⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  Also, the domesticated bees are generally honeybees. And unfortunately, honeybee and wild bees don’t fulfill the same rile, so even if we replaced wild bees with honeybees 1:1, we still wouldn’t be able to polinate everything.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨With the current state of the news, April's fools aren't fun anymore because they can't be distinguished as easily as before⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  I would almost find the Wisconsin one funny since it’s already a state and I’d just assume grandpa Hitler was sundowning.

  Goddamn this is fucked…

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨New game: give yourself one point for each of these you've done this year or last year (24/25). I've got 4 points!⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  0 points, I lose

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Organic Maps migrates to Forgejo due to GitHub account blocked by Microsoft.⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  So now we know how to instantly delist any project on GitHub.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Privacy disaster as LGBTQ+ and BDSM dating apps leak private photos.⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  Boring/repetitive work. For example, I regularly use an AI coding assistant to block our basic loop templates with variables filled in, or have it quickly finish the multiple case statements or assigning values to an object with a bunch of properties.

  In little things like that, it’s great. But once you get past a medium sized function, it goes off the rails. I’ve had it make up parameters in stock library functions based on what I asked it for.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Why aren't there mass protests in the USA?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Yeah, insurrection is a form of protest, I guess.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨I love Lemmy. ❤️👽🥰 Do you love Lemmy 👽? 😄☀️⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Bruh, that was being respectful. If you think this is profane or disrespectful, you’re not going to have a good time here. Or, frankly anywhere in the net or real life.

  Learn to accept criticism and not treat it as a personal attack, your experience will be much better for it.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨CISA fires then rehires security crew, and puts them on hold⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Well, when your goal is to destroy government programs and offices so they they get replaced by rent seeking corporations so they can suck every penny from you, it really is.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Show top LLMs buggy code and they'll finish off the mistakes rather than fix them.⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  And once you get into that infinite loop, it’s basically impossible to get out of it.

  The easiest way I found to get out of that loop, is to get mad at the AI so it hangs up on you.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Majority of AI Researchers Say Tech Industry Is Pouring Billions Into a Dead End⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  The number of times my CTO says we’re going to do THING, only to have to be told that this isn’t how things work…

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨I am at a loss on words⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Ok, so your complaint is the door orientation, not the position. I disagree with the idea that it doesn’t necessarily work, given how many other instances of the meme get a bit out there and are intentionally setup to be recognizable yet inscrutable. But I can see why it wouldn’t work for people.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨I am at a loss on words⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  It’s not the same position tho. If you look at the two images side by side, you can see the right door is noticeably lower than the left door in the final panel, but even in the previous panel:

  Image

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨I am at a loss on words⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  yet the same position of the right door in frame 4 apparently indicates a person lying down.

  Check again friend, the back right door is open in panel 4, njt the same front right door.

  It’s hard to tell the difference, but it is different. Took me way too long to get the joke too cuz of that

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Call Them. Replace Them.⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Well, 10 Democrats voted to censure another Democrat as noted in the image. The underlying context is that Greene was heckling Der Furher when he was having a spell of verbal diarrhea when speaking in the fascist Empire council chamber.