• Admiral Patrick@dubvee.org
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    3 days ago

    I don’t disagree, but it’s not quite as easy as that especially for admins of a large instance. It’s just a lot of voices, some legitimate, some part of a hydra campaign, and others legitimate but only spouting the hydra narrative because they heard it so much and bought into it (forgive the term, but “useful idiots”).

    For as many as I banned myself (I run a small instance), I probably let 10 slide because I couldn’t prove they were one of the hydra heads.

    My instance is small enough to fly under the radar, but for larger instances, the hydra heads will absolutely flood the YePowerTrippingBastards-esque communities and screech they’re being censored, [Big instance] is censoring [blank], [Big instance] wants genocide, etc in an attempt to spread their message via a corrupted version of the Streisand Effect.

    TL;DR is it’s an easy game for the bad actors to play and a very unlevel playing field for everyone else. I wish there were an easy answer, but there really isn’t. The only way I’ve found to combat it on my own instance is to just disallow “agenda posting” (which I realize is a very blunt instrument, but it’s the best I can do given the platform limitations).

    • PhilipTheBucket@ponder.catOP
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      3 days ago

      Yeah, agreed on all counts. I’ve seen them trying to manipulate the mod teams to do their bidding, and I sort of suspect that the campaign against FlyingSquid happened because he was taking action against the misinformation and they don’t like that and want to bully him out so they’ll have less resistance in the future.

        • PhilipTheBucket@ponder.catOP
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          3 days ago

          Did they? What happened? I didn’t hear about this. politics@LW was so bizarre and useless that I gave up on it a while back.

          I feel like Jordan could be pressured into doing things the way someone was pressuring him to do them, and so they tried to pressure him, while FS would argue for what he thought was right, and so they tried to get rid of him completely. And I think on both counts they’ve been succeeding pretty well.

          • Admiral Patrick@dubvee.org
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            3 days ago

            It’s been a while, but the troll in question was spamming Jordan’s avatar image all over the place with a lot of unflattering (and false) accusations (I’ll just leave it at that).