Ask Lemmy @lemmy.world aodhsishaj @lemmy.world 10mo ago

Has anyone else noticed a large influx of Trolls lately?

This isn't about immediately filtered content, like the disgusting DuffMan George Floyd meme, or Holocaust denial. That's pretty well kept in check by mod tools. I'm also not talking about cogent or even pointed political discussion.

I'm not even talking about necessarily in this community directly, however in a lot of other spaces I've noticed a lot of accounts using divisive language and terms like "The ineffectual left" "single issue voters" "ignorant right wing morons". Lots of straw man arguments, lots of willful ignorance.

I'm not a centrist, I'm very very very far left however I know well enough not to patently dismiss the talking points of others, outside of course calls to genocide. I know what dog whistles sound like, and I'm hearing a lot of them lately.

Most egregiously I'm seeing very long form post replies that read very much like what is generated from LLMs.

So I guess my question is, how're we all fairing with what might be the largest Turing test ever?

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141 comments

I've noticed a huge influx of anti-Biden posts and comments, to the extent that I honestly think we're finally getting the reddit treatment. I remember there, when the Russian Internet connection went down, and for like a day all those kinds of posts nearly evaporated. And it seems like those accounts don't just do the overtly political things, they also engage in other areas, usually with a conservative slant.
- Yeah, that's a lot of what I've been seeing, bad faith actors sowing dissent.
  
  Edit: ducking autocorrect
  
  Sowing*
  
  Pretty sure this was child labour, not actors.
- We used to think that if we had user-generated content, we would all be immune to governments, corporations and other powerful actors spreading propaganda because we would get our information from each other, not them.
  
  Turns out: governments, corporations, other powerful actors are perfectly capable of paying "users" to "generate content" and not even disclose this.
  
  The Internet used to be an exciting development, now it's just like, yeah it exists, so what.
  
  I remember, after being on the internet for a while, when the www standard was being adopted and all the web pages started popping up. It was so cool to see the kinds of content people were using it for. Then we got search engines like altavista, and it honestly seemed magical. It was like this egalitarian utopia, where all this knowledge was available to everyone; it was hard not to feel like it was the start of an amazing new phase for society.
  
  So it was just soul crushing to me when we first started seeing intentional manipulation and misinformation. Search results that were skewed by paid advertisements or google bombing, propaganda being pushed into discussion forums, and all the fake news... it all represented the end of that amazing new phase. Heartbreaking.
  
  paying "users"
  
  And using LLMs, then eventually getting useful idiots involved as well.
- Yeah lots of anti-Bidens. Totally Russian trolls.
  
  https://www.nytimes.com/2024/05/15/us/politics/russia-disinformation-election.html
  
  It's starting, for sure. Assuming it ever really stopped, that is.
  
  "those people opposed to our glorious leader are surely from our external enemies ethnic group!"
  
  Do you even realize how xenophobic you sound?
- Meanwhile, our Lord and Savior PugJesus is singlehandedly taking the fight to the trolls.
  
  I'm just trying to remind them they aren't welcome in decent places. I wouldn't go to .ml or worse, Hexbear or grad, if you paid me.
- Nope, not a bot and anti-Biden registered Dem. You guys always want to Strawman anti-Biden comments as either "angry conservatives" or "Russian-psyops". You don't actually address the concerns either, just brush them off as trolls. Discourse on Lemmy is a echo-chambered joke already. It doesn't need trolls to ruin it, you've done plenty well yourselves.
- Maybe there are people that are outside of America and don't have direct impact of who wins the election and they don't have to blindly praise biden. Trump is a piece of shi but acting like criticizing Biden is some kind of a foreign conspiracy is funny.
  
  Criticising him? No.
  
  Criticising him and going "I'm not gonna vote for genocide Joe"?
  
  Yes.
  
  If you were Putin, you'd do everything in your power to see Trump elected. And if you pretend Russian troll factories don't exist then we know you're in one.
  
  Maybe it's because we saw this exact fucking shit swing the election in 2016 and a lot of people have no patience for it left.
The growing intensity of straw manning over the past decade has hurt us all so much.

Don't try to characterize what "they" would do, then get mad at your hypothetical. We need to talk to each other instead of about each other.
- Good call. How are you? Have you had enough water today?
  
  You WOULD ask that you FILTHY bot!
  
  Wow, imagine calling out a fucker like that, how dare you.
Plenty of “genocide Joe”, lib bashing, “both sides”, implication that if you vote for Biden you’re complicit in genocide, and many other anti-vote and anti-democrat posts all around.

Not sure what you’re reading that constitutes “dog whistles”, there have been some posts mocking right wing responses and some fediverse self-policing and knee jerk reactions to the female trapped in the forest with either man or bear discussion that have already gone through several evolutions and iterations.

The mockery of singe issue voters is deserved taken in the context of the failure to vote being trump fascism and even more genocide. Not sure what you’re trying to offer there other than what? We should listen to more open to “genocide Joe” comments and become immobilized with ambivalence and again, let fascism win by inaction?

Personally, I’m not hearing dog whistles. I’m reading people directly trying to influence opinion to not vote for Biden by any means necessary while willfully and actively avoiding any consequences to a trump win.
- I’m reading people directly trying to influence opinion to not vote for Biden by any means necessary while willfully and actively avoiding any consequences to a trump win
  
  Exactly, Kremlin shills and trolls using Israel's genocide as a wedge issue to get their asset into the White House again so he cuts support for Ukraine and pulls out of NATO.
  
  At this point it's not just Kremlin shills. Netanyahu very obviously prefers Trump as well. These "leftists" don't even realize they've gone full mossad.
- It's hilarious seeing them run the exact same "corrupt DNC" playbook when no Dems from 2016 are even in this race. They are doing it because they are lazy, and because there are still enough people who are so bought into this that it still seems to fool a handful of idiots.
Wait... single issue politics is a real, proven, thing. Don't lump that in with ad hominem attacks. If you're not going to vote for someone you otherwise would because of a single issue, you're a single issue voter.
- While I do absolutely agree that single issue politics is a real thing like you showed, literally the only reply to your comment was "if you are a single issue voter, you're an idiot".
  
  So I also think OP has a point here and we're talking more about the people who use the term as an ad hominem attack, which I certainly have seen plenty of. And now Lemmy has provided us with yet another example of people taking something legitimate and turning it into a weakness/attackable offence. Like some trolls and racist people on the right now talk about DEI in negative terms
  
  Fair points. I'm guilty of just saying "single issue voters," without elaborating on every comment. That could easily be seen as an indirect ad-hominem attack. Maybe I should make a copy-pasta response for whenever I see someone arguing for single-issue decision making.
  
  That said, there are justifiable single-issue decisions. If Trump was spouting rhetoric about shutting down all support of Israel, yeah. I can stand behind folks "switching sides" over this. Free Choice, ditto. 2A I have a harder time with, but that's because there are usually so many other issues that you'd think are more important. Not my decision, but I have less sympathy for people who think being able to own a gun is more important than the ability to unionize.
  
  Anyhoo, like I said: fair points.
- If you're not going to vote for someone you otherwise would because of a single issue, you're a single issue voter.
  
  I thought it was you decided who to vote on based on a single issue. If you care about multiple issues, and any one of them is a deal breaker, then wouldn't you be a multi-issue voter?
  
  edit: "can can" -> "care"
  
  I thought that's what I wrote, but if it didn't come across right, I apologize.
  
  Single issue voting means how you vote is determined by a single issue. That includes not voting at all because of a single issue. What I meant to say above is that if you would vote for X, but choose to not vote at all because of one issue, you're a single issue voter. A single issue is deciding your vote.
  
  As Rush once sang:
  
  If you choose not to decide You still have made a choice
- And an idiot
It's election season, so get used to this. Other countries have learned how to divide us using social media, not to mention the years of experience Fox New and Co. have in doing just that. On top of it, we now have AI generated posts to contend with. It's not getting better anytime soon...personally, I just ignore any post that sounds like it's inflammatory (which sadly are almost all political posts, and everything Musk).
Yes it has been a stark difference that picked up this month. I was in what used to feel like a chill community and the sheer vitriol of the threads the past week has been really annoying.
- Yes, that's absolutely the point of my post. Big upswing in bad actors.
- This is what it's like on .ml, where all the hexbear trolls are still allowed. What's happening is these trolls are making alts specifically to push propaganda. Their admins even admit it.
I think some communities might benefit from a very strict no-politics rule. Because this right wing trolling is ruining lemmy for me.
- Like when all the rightoids show up to a discussion and spam image macros of pigs shitting on their own balls?
  
  Get real, this is a left-centered platform, 98% of the trolls aren't right wing, not by a country mile.
  
  The Russians are all over hexbear. Read the rare thread about Ukraine over there and it's literally the same shit the Russian trolls say.
  
  These aren't leftists, they are right wingers (barely) pretending to be leftists.
- TIL lemmygrad.ml is right wing.
  
  And dbzer0
- There's a lot of left wing trolling as well, even more so imo.
- Who decides what is/isn't politics?
  
  everything is political when the right wing is desperate for culture wars and division.
  
  That's political innit
- "no politics" is what the right says when you suggest that maybe gay people are people. What you mean is a "no conservatives" rule.
  
  Sorry but you're right
- Hilarity.
  
  "Right wing" for this community is if someone is a capitalist.
  
  Ya'll have a super left wing echo chamber that's freaking out about any dissent.
  
  This sort of shit is exactly why everyone is a political extremist now. You insert yourselves into communities that only agree with you.
  
  In which way Capitalism isn't right wing?
I’m seeing very long form post replies that read very much like what is generated from LLMs.

Oh goodness, as one who has a bad habit of putting responses into essay form, I hope this doesn't refer to me. I'm not an LLM. Honest!

Okay, I'm pretty sure I'm human. It's a damn convincing hallucination.
- Please select all squares with a bicycle.
  
  No bicycle detected.
  
  Powered by tesla ai
- You got me this time Chat-GPT4o
- I appologize for the confusion. I will do my best to reffer to you as "Not LLM" from now on. Does this satisfy your rrequset?
- "Chatgpt, convince me you are not an LLM"
- I write long winded replies which can best be described as multi-volume box set paragraphs.
  
  I don't know what LLM is........did he mean LMM? That's my innitials!
Don't pay attention to them. Don't freed them and move on.
- The kind of trolls I'm talking about start a conversation with you, ask you leading questions and pull into a discussion though. Then BAM dog whistles. It's insidious.
  
  I'm well aware of the old adage "Don't feed the Trolls"
  
  My larger question is how do we deal with the leverage an LLM gives trolls?
  
  The kind of trolls I’m talking about start a conversation with you, ask you leading questions and pull into a discussion though. Then BAM dog whistles. It’s insidious.
  
  If that happens stop talking to them.
  
  how do we deal with the leverage an LLM gives trolls?
  
  Once again, stop talking to them. Let the mods do their job.
  
  EDIT or you can block them. You have the tools to solve the problem. Use them.
Not feeling that, but I block hexbear and lemmygrad
- That's why they've started making alts on .world and .ee
I have a comment on my profile where I express some observations about the cyber truck that weren't expressly negative and it was down voted to hell.

Maybe not so many trolls, but there's a lot of pretentiousness.
- Just like with Reddit, there are a lot of people who use the downvote button if they just disagree, which isn't really the intent. So you're likely to get downvotes for any unpopular subjective opinion.
  
  Yeah I generally agree with that.
  
  I find that people really put a lot of stock into how much they like or dislike something subjectively rather than looking at it from an objective perspective.
  
  But if a post gets tons of downvotes, it's not necessarily or even often because people don't like the opinion. It's usually because it was pure opinion stated as a fact or in hostile language or in unreadable writing or the user was otherwise behaving like an asshole.
- This exact thing led me to mostly lurk rather than post
Yes, the hexbears and their .ml ilk have started to use alts to troll the larger forums. Their admins openly admit that their only interest within the fediverse is information warfare.

Other instance need to be taking this as seriously as they would be taking a nazi instance admin admitting to the same things.
- I'm new to the fediverse, and largely I don't get it, yet.
  
  But aren't the things you're talking about the type of reasons you'd give to DEfederate from that one instance?
Only during the night. They turn to stone during the daytime.
Yes - I wish Reddit would keep them...
yes, very much. i've been telling my partner it may be time to give up on Lemmy.

the ones that kill me are the long-form posts that seem to be making one point then pivot in the middle and get confusing. they're just muddying the waters but people who don't read past the first sentence or two upvote so they gain traction.
- Gish gallop. It's a common tactic used by authoritarians with no real arguments.
I see more posts about "have you seen this or that in lemmy recently" or "lemmy is worse than reddit" posts more often than these supposed trolls. Sure they exist but all of the time they are down voted or deleted.

There is also someone saying in the comments that criticizing biden is a foreign conspiracy. Some of these Americans just look like a reflection of the right but call themselves left. I'm not American so I face no real threat(as far as I'm aware) regardless of who gets elected there. So I just think you can criticize "both sides" people without making your leader look immortal
- Do you ever sort by hot? Or are you mainly in the default sort?
  
  I'm on default and there's always posts like this every week. Last week it was about the bear and how supposedly lemmy is more mysogynist than reddit. Before it was about how lemmy is too one sided and all the comments agreeing are zionists ranting that their comments get downvoted so apparently lemmy is filled with reddits ban list.
  
  I don't have any problem with this but I left reddit cause I was getting more posts about rants about some other bad posts than the bad post's themselves. Example stremio addons subreddit. That shit was filled with entitled miserable people angry that free software was being used by new people. I never saw that much toxicity even on any arch linux forums.
  
  There are some instances like hexbear, lemmy.ml, lemmygrad that I see people using words left may not like. But it's definitely not as bad as it's portrayed. Blocking these can help.
I always suspect a lot of them are coming from Reddit to take their daily dump on something to discourage others from using. All in hopes that we come back to Reddit so that they can gaslight, cry to mods and have us banned again just for their own amusement.

Yeah they say that the internet in general can produce these kinds of people from all corners, but you do notice by behavior. If it isn't Reddit, it's got to be Twitter. One of the two, they're the most rabid of the bunch that would resort to these kind of things because they don't lead any productive lives.
- Don't forget, there is a large and worldwide vested interest in maintaining online divisiveness.
  
  The internet has become our global hearth. The grand majority of humanity participate in the internet to communicate with each other for conversation, connectedness, and social expression.
  
  This is very bad for authoritarian regimes, whether they are currently in power or attempting to enter into power or attempting to expand their power.
  
  Should someone do something that is considered "bad", information about that will spread around the world as fast as a lie ever could.
  
  To prevent that from hampering their schemes, the smart thing to do would be to poison the source. If you hate everyone on the internet because you have been effectively compromised by psychological poison, then you will not trust the people on the internet that you communicate with when they tell you something bad has happened.
  
  Therefore, the mote of power you could add to collective action is rendered ineffective.
  
  And, the interesting thing is they don't have to fool everybody. They only have to fool enough of us that our own internal division prevents effective action.
  
  I never really believed in a devil growing up, but if I did believe in a devil now, I would definitely say that this is one of his activities.
  
  One of the best comments I've ever read on lemmy
Are they coming from a specific instance? I've blocked a couple and my lemmy experience drastically improved
Is it simply just the political majority starting to catch up with Lemmy and its extreme left ideology?

Also i know a guy who runs a bunch of llm powered bots to produce flat earth propaganda flatgpt one could say. There are some beautiful argument chains.

I've also run into some cases where u can do a little prompt injection and it starts saying potato instead of any noun.
- There are some beautiful argument chains.
  
  Doubt.
Me? No, and I've been around for a while
Circle of life on the internet. Some public forums last longer than others. Some go full facist dictatorship, some devolve into anarchy, some die out completely. Nirvananet, Totse, gamefaqs, 4chan, 99chan, imgur, whirlpool forums, stack exchange, reddit, Lemmy. Theres no telling which way a rudderless ship will drift. You just do what you can, and get off when she starts going under
- ...............whirlpool forums?
Nope, maybe try to find new communities?
- Why wouldn't I try to improve the ones I'm already in?
There's a reason I drew this.
I'm not sure I'd call them "trolls."

I think Lemmy and the fediverse in general is vulnerable to bot manipulation because no one is going to give out personal information to random instances.

There are users on !autism@lemmy.world who say that they get accused of being bots.
tbh not really

Even the largest comment threads tend to only have a select few comments that are either blatant shilling or next level dumb.

Everyone else seems to have at least several comments that match their opinion.

Even the complaints about .ml spamming seem mostly untrue, I haven't really seen any spam or mod deleted content.

ml and world defnitley mod or ban eachother, but I don't think they're increasing in trolls.
People just say their agument and their idea.

Yo, as long as they are not bot spaming ads or p*rn, I seem ok.
Fight stupid with stupid.

In this case, random copypastas are one thing that works well. Wastes their time, and communicates the fact that you think they are stupid. *cue Undertaker copypasta*

Also, would be great if every community had the tiananmen copypasta stickied.
- I don't think that'll help anyone to be honest. Usually that approach just feeds the issue of Poe's law which empowers radicalization.
  
  https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poe's_law
  
  https://gnet-research.org/2023/07/28/schrodingers-joke-the-weaponisation-of-irony-and-humour-in-the-alt-right/

141 comments