The sole moderator doesn’t even follow their own rules: https://lemmy.ca/post/22741340?scrollToComments=true
I’ll just say it - it’s a Russian propaganda community. Is there any reason this community needs to exist on Lemmy.ca? Is there a rule against blatant astroturfing / propaganda / misinformation? I don’t think the 5 rules in the sidebar are going to be enough to stop an army of trolls:
No bigotry - including racism, sexism, ableism, homophobia, transphobia, > or xenophobia. Be respectful. Everyone should feel welcome here. No porn. Use the NSFW tag when needed. No Ads / Spamming. Bot accounts need to be flagged as such in their settings.
Maybe time to get ahead of it?
After threats of doxing and it being brought to our attention that /u/marathon was also mass banning users from the /c/geopolitical_analysis community, we’ve removed that user and community from lemmy.ca.
I’m not too knowledgeable about the c/geopolitics community because it wasn’t my cup of tea and I blocked it early on. But I interact with the mod/user in question on !toronto@lemmy.ca and !leaf_nation@lemmy.ca. I’m pretty confident they’re an individual who follows the Toronto Maple Leafs and lives in Toronto and not a bot account or professional propaganda account or anything like that. You might find their politics view objectionable. I can’t really speak to that. You can block communities you don’t want to see in your feeds
You don’t have to be a professional to parrot Russian propaganda. How it works is they find a sympathetic ear, and then spoon feed this garbage content with them with the knowledge that someone will post it. Sometimes the content is targeted, other times it’s just pushed through these low quality / fake news sites and then gets picked up on social media and spreads. Sometimes the content starts out neutral-ish, then they build up this pro-Russian slant over time, slowly mixing in all this nonsense. No propaganda feed (for any nation) is 100% propaganda - it’s going to be 20% real news, 20% opinion, 20% opinions parroting Russian state media, etc. etc. It’s similar to the magic mix Facebook gives you in your feed.
Beyond the main issue that this thinly-veiled propaganda community is going to attract the wrong audience and expose the existing/future audience here to utter bullshit, I take specific issue that the end goal is to undermine the security of our fucking country. Russia has been fighting a cyber and information war against us for over a decade and we can’t just look away and pretend it’s harmless. Between allowing state sanctioned cybercriminals to flourish and attack our hospitals with ransomware, to trying to undermine democracy across the globe, we need to step up our game and put our foot down against this shit because it’s going to get a lot worse, and the sooner we nip it in the bud, the better.
And I remember when Reddit, Facebook, and Twitter turned a blind eye to blatant astroturfing and widespread manipulation from around 2015-2020, pretending their sites weren’t overrun with inauthentic behaviour. The lesson from that is that you need to take disinformation and coordinated manipulation seriously if you want to have a viable community on the internet. Lemmy.ca has to get in front of this stuff. (who am I kidding - Reddit and Twitter are still at least 50% bots.)
Blocking and not calling out bullshit is actually a problem because it allows malicious users to freely spread their bullshit without any opposing views. This makes those views seem more widespread and legitimate than they actually are.
You seem very quick to want to censor, and not too concerned with whether the content is malicious or just bullshit. Making baseless positive claims about Russia (for example) is certainly not hate speech. I don’t see how it’s malicious. I agree there’s a good chance it’s bullshit. Wanting to censor rather than block what’s seen as bullshit to some also carries problems for growing a democratic community.
This thread has conflated a legitimate question of whether our sidebar rules are appropriately worded with do we like the community in question or not.
Perhaps a good focus is on misinformation. Can we define it, do we want to handle it in a certain way on this instance? Perhaps imagining how we’d want to handle a community/user/mod that posts baseless conspiracy theories in general is a good thought experiment
Ah. Just to clarify, I was not talking about this specific community in OP’s post, but the practice of blocking in general. There have been studies showing the negative effects of blocking on communities by allowing negative / malicious content to go unchecked
Yes cancel and block all views that don’t align with your views. And complain when a global platform has global viewpoints. Much sense.
Yah opposing views my ass, it’s full of propaganda and nothing else. If you think that’s an “opposing view” then I have bad news for you.
