Russian bots with a Kremlin disinformation network published 120,000 fake anti-Ukraine quotes falsely attributed to celebrities, including Jennifer Aniston and Scarlett Johansson, in one day, the independent Russian media outlet Agentsvo reported June 15.
Quotes appeared over celebrity photos, displaying messages calling to end aid to Ukraine and describing European collapse.
The images were published between June 14-15 by the Kremlin disinformation network Dvoynyk, a representative of the Bot Blocker project told Agentsvo. The fake quotes have since garnered over 500,000 views.
Any hope of civility and partisanship ended when social media received widespread appeal.
No, it ended when attention optimization and monetization became the objective.
If social media was all “dumb” it would be totally different, though I suppose keeping third party monetization out is always difficult.
I’m just a shitty software engineer but I’ve always dreamed up a social media network — perhaps opensource/non-profit — that promoted in good faith the best of humanity… I think there are methods that this could be achieved and I wish someone like Wikipedia or Mozilla would pursue in earnest. I’ve been part of the Jimmy Wales Wiki Social discord but I’m not yet sure if they’re on the right track.
Bro the fediverse is one of the worst platforms when it comes to information warfare. One of the major instances is pretty clearly a training ground for Russian propagandists before they get promoted to Facebook or reddit.
But it doesn’t work as well because you can block entire instances. These people self identify by choosing the instance so it’s easy to just block all posts and comments, even those from people you’ve never seen before.
Blocking an instance only removes your individual ability to interact with an instance. It doesn’t have any impact on the information warfare value of the instance. If anything, it only amplifies it by self-sequestration of opposing voices.
It’s not my responsibility to fix everyone in the world. It’s good that these people sequester themselves. They can yell at each other.
Lemmy has good tools for blocking bad users and communities / instances. That’s sufficient for now. Better moderation will help too.