The entire modern day “conservative” movement has 100% been astroturfed.
If it’s only astroturf, why are americans still doing fuck all?
I believe a lot of MAGA influencers are problably either directly employed by the Kremlin, or at least supported from there. For Russia, it is the easiest way to destroy their enemies.
Look what a number Russia did on the UK with their Brexit. And look what they currently do with idiot right wingers in Europe, who, despite “My country first, fuck the rest” always seem to have a very soft spot for “poor old sactioned Russia”, and they more or less unisono state that the Russian attack on Ukraine is just e defense against western/NATO aggression.
And it’s a problem that should have been addressed but a large part of the economy depends on these bots to generate rage for views. So no regulations coming soon because facebooks bottom line or what ever
also a large part of our government depends on these bots for their power and influence.
Which is why no action will ever be taken against them.
Cause they will never vote to lessen their power and influence.
Russia has for the last decade at least, been influencing media in the west to cause doubt in various systems of governance.
The most interesting article I saw this week was Eastern Orthodox churches in the US are seeing a massive increase in attendance from mostly “conservative” young men. Easter orthodox has never had much influence in the US, but now it’s becoming popular? Why is that?
I spotted an article myself this week. Apparently they tried to make a move. https://united24media.com/latest-news/russian-orthodox-church-accused-of-war-propaganda-now-lobbying-in-washington-13560
Something nobody talks about is how the internet transformed into a whole other beast around 2015 to 2016. Nobody talks about it because all the bots (used loosely to mean bad actors of human or otherwise) control discourse. It’s masses of undefineable swarms of bot posting at any give moment in any given part of the internet.
People talk about that constantly?
If you ask someone if the Internet is full of bots they will tell you yes. However 5 minutes later they will be on social media and forget about it.
It’s impossible to think critically all the time.
Uhh what? Who people?
The bot accusation is a rhetorical cudgel in itself. What I mean is the bot swarms aren’t configured to speak of the before times.
Another thing is that it’s as if easily half the population of actual human posters have no knowledge of the time before. Could this be true on a technical basis. I know internet adoption grew fast more recently in some parts of the world. But how does the data line up? I haven’t looked.
So the real human components of the bot swarms so to speak are living a sort of allegory of the cave. They have no knowledge of the world wide web as a whole. They only know the slice of internet they started using in the bot swarm era. For them it seems to be nothing but a battle grounds of social, political, commercial warfare. Basically this is the big tech media platforms.
It doesn’t seem to compute for people much more than a shallow saying, “it’s all bots”. Yeah of course every says that all the time. But how is it all bots? How much if any do they know of outside the few apps on their phone. People don’t seem to have much knowledge of the before times very much. Or the internet outside of social media at all.
People hardly ever make old references. Nobody understands old colloquialisms. That seems like it could be a litmus test for someone who is a real human being.
I feel like it’s can roughly comprehend the vibe of what you’re saying, but im losing you on the specifics.
I feel like you’re trying to apply a model of both young people and bots such that they don’t understand a time before the large scale proliferation of bots?
Bought and paid for accounts. Propaganda machine is amazing for MAGA, wonder why?
Just lol.
Betcha QAnon was a Russian program after all
Funny how the conspiracists couldn’t see it
The internet is a swamp of lies.
Couldn’t these accounts just be using VPNs? Or is that proven not to be the case?
As in, could they be using VPNs so they appear to be from outside the US, but actually aren’t?
… I mean I guess? But that seems like an expensive way to make yourself less credible.
Yes that’s what I meant. I’m not saying that’s the case but it’s a possibility.
If I were spreading hate online I would want to hide my location but who knows if they’d think the same way.
But why use a VPN to appear from outside the country? Why not just use a VPN node within the US, so it’s not obviously russian but still obscures your location? For that matter MAGA, who they’re supporting, currently is in power and in the US there’s nothing illegal about posting vile political rhetoric online. So there’s no reason to not simply make up usernames and create a bunch of twitter accounts. You’d save a great deal of money and make yourself appear a great deal more credible if you just made yourself appear as though you were in the US, not in countries known for having whole industries centered around online astroturfing services.
Fair point but you could also ask why someone foreign wouldn’t use a VPN to appear from inside the country.
I can think of a reason why you would want to hide your location even if you were in the US, the government in control now may not be in control forever and maybe the new gov will hold you accountable.
Hold you accountable for what? Nothing being done here is remotely illegal. I shill hard for my political beliefs and Warl0k3 isn’t my real name, how is what they’re doing (if they were really from the US) any different?
As for a foreign group using VPNs, why bother? This information hasn’t ever been reported before, and any investigation into it is both unlikely under the current administration and has the resources to blow thru any cheap VPN you might be using for large scale commerical work like this. And even if that happens, nothing will happen to you. So why spend the money?
I don’t care to join in on the rest of this discussion but:
Hold you accountable for what? Nothing being done here is remotely illegal.
The definition of “illegal” could change in a future government. This is one of the strongest arguments for internet privacy in general: what is legal today may be “illegal” tomorrow or even “legal but the government doesn’t care about the law”
In a broad sense sure, and that’s a great reason to use a VPN (especially if you listen to VPN ads on youtube)!
It really isn’t a good reason in this example, though. At least, not as an explanation for setting your location to be outside of the US. Use of a VPN is identifiable (unless you set it up yourself, which isn’t anonymous) so it will make no difference where you’re located if the authoritarian government you’re supporting gets replaced with an even more authoritarian one that decides to prosecute people being mean to them online, and it can only serve to incriminate you if the data ever gets leaked (like what happened here).
Generally this is true, but within the scope of this hypothetical it doesn’t really change that this fundementally doesn’t make sense.
For whatever they want, it’s just an example of being paranoid and a reason to want to hide your location. Another being your work finding out you’re being an asshole online and then being fired for it, etc.
For the foreign group, to seem more credible by appearing to be from the target country.
I’m not arguing that these counter-points I’m suggesting are strong, just that it’s possible however unlikely they may be.
It’s also possible that this is all being orchestrated by the lizard cabal (prove me wrong, I dare you) but hopefully we can agree that our time is going to be much better spent discussing things that are actually likely instead of what the lizard pope might be planning next.
If it rises to the level of defamation or libel it’s illegal. Like Candace and her claim that Macron’s wife is trans.
And so is tweeting about a fire while in a crowded theater, but defamation/libel are famously hard to even show standing for, let alone prosecute. And they (oversimplifying) generally do not apply to speech critical of a public figure, which is why we can say things like “Stephen miller is a collective of sentient bugs stuffed into a skin suit made from stitched-together horse foreskins that’s embezzling millions of dollars that he then spends on underage sheep and recreational bidets” without worrying about legal repercussions.
Expensive ? What are you spending for a vpn?
Anything is expensive if it’s unnecessary. You’d be surprised how many people won’t even pay me a nickle to cast a spell to protect them from the ghosts of ants they’ve stepped on.
Commercial VPN services aren’t particularly cheap.
A couple could, sure. The sheer amount of MAGAt account rot from other parts of the globe isn’t an oddity, it’s a coincidence.
Stop defending MAGAt facism by the way of Russia.
How is asking a question defending MAGA? I’m just considering all possibilities instead of blindly accepting the one presented. It seemed odd nobody was thinking of the possibility to use VPNs, that’s all.
An unironic use of “just asking questions”, dang.
