I swear, every time most of the time I see someone being particularly rude, ignorant, and inappropriate on a post (usually political in origin, or they swing it to being political) I click on their profile and see it has been created that same day.
They are only there to sow discord. Only to piss people off. Idk if we can just report them (for what?) but I’d like to try exposing them before responding and interacting…
I am guilty of gobbling up the bait. I’ve started looking at profiles of people that piss me off exceptionally and noticed they’re burner bot loser accounts.
I guess i just want to say I’ve noticed it!
Could you tell that to the c/politics commenters who seem to think russian shills lurk behind every rock?
I don’t really think political spending is going towards Lemmy trolls, much less like…national propaganda spending. Shitty advertising bots maybe.
Nor do I. I don’t think lemmy is large enough for such spending to have enough return on investment to make it worthwhile. But it’s convenient to dismiss deviations from centrist orthodoxy as the output of shills, and so it happens.
There are 2 million monthly active Lemmy users. That’s a vast untapped market of grassroots users many who likely aren’t on many other platforms, due to the nature of Lemmy.
The first state actor to get in on the ground floor and shape the collective opinion of lemmings as a whole will influence the future outlook of every user of the fediverse. Especially young people. Majority opinion, majority rule.
I believe we can see this taking place on instances like .world and hexbear, but I’m sure it’s happening in a semi-automated fashion across most instances.
Atlantic Council: Collective Security In a Federated World