It's unbelievable how vocal the minority of conservatives on reddit have suddenly gotten in the one sub where a large demographic of important voters often interact. Hmmm. Coincidence?
Now for creating bot farms, you’re going to need to sail those waters yourself, as they’re often against TOS/UAs, but I don’t think you’ll have to look too hard
Edit: Republicans didn’t like the idea of fighting back ig
This is simply the reality of what division brings. The second it becomes less about discussion and more about us vs them the topics stop mattering. Discussion breaks down and you have yet another rift our society - regardless of how many people probably are at neither extreme. Anyone with moderate ideals or somewhere in between is ultimately forced to one side or the other ... or trampled by both. It's a disgusting degradation of a culture/society that despite being more connected than ever is finding more and more ways to isolate everyone.
Good on you for speaking up on what you believe. It sucks sometimes but it's better to put the words out there.
Part of the troll factory tactic is to make it a morally grey zone, because they know they have the money and the numbers to materialize it. Indiscriminately doing this is helping them in their effort to lower the information to noise ratio and make their efforts more indistinguishable from "the other side's" turning it into a "well, they would do it too, if they were as successful and had as much money and resources as us" argument.
I'm aware of this tactic. There are a few well documented systems that work very efficiently at splintering groups. The problem with labeling any conversation that falls into the grey area, like it or not, is actually alienating the vast majority of nonpolarized viewpoints. Either you fall in line with faction a or b or you are the enemy of both. Political parties have used this effectively for decades. You beat the majority by splitting them into subfactions. This thread and topic is a spectacular demonstration of the result.
See but, this isn’t indiscriminate action, I mentioned in another comment that I don’t mean flood shit posts, but to flood with valuable and informative content.
If we cannot stop the pipe from spewing sewage, we have to counter flood with enriched flow to lower the ratio of shit:water.
We will still have a flooding problem, don’t get me wrong, but that is a much larger problem that exists. Republicans have been quoted as stating they just want to muddy waters. We need to flood with water to reduce how muddy they truly are. And certainly not with more mud.
The distinct problem we face is that of busy minds who don’t have the capacity to filter. So they flood with mud to bog down the mind. Hope this makes sense and helps to clear up my intentions/proposed soln.
While it has been proven time and again that corps and countries will seed social media with narratives...
I would caution people against brigadeing against ideologies and opinions counter to what you may be comfortable with. That is a surefire way to make an echo chamber. Simply downvoting an opinion you don't agree with- without providing discussion simply becomes a silent mechanism for oppressing those views.
This statement in and of itself is divisive and isn't helpful. The behavior is no better than the behavior you apparently abhor.
I am no fan of most of the positions taken but I'm not so closed minded to suppress someone else's opinion without discussion.
You are welcome to disagree, but being an instigator by your actions and words will not improve this community. Period.
Edit:
Allow me to shed light on why I said be careful.
Fascism (/ˈfæʃɪzəm/ FASH-iz-əm) is a far-right, authoritarian, ultranationalist political ideology and movement,[1][2][3] characterized by a dictatorial leader, centralized autocracy, militarism, forcible suppression of opposition, belief in a natural social hierarchy, subordination of individual interests for the perceived good of the nation....
To enforce only one side of a conversation is in effect only creating the exact same environment. It's hypocrisy. I agree we should be mindful- but also mindful we ourselves do not become oppressive.
What irony? Your comment is perfectly legible. Fortunately this hasn't turned out like reddit, where massively downvoted comments get hidden, and the moderators and admins who would ban you for your comments just being "too negative" are either localized to instances or are no longer present.
The only bad thing is you can't normally see and check out who's doing the downvoting, which promotes unverifiable suspicion since people are going to make up their own answer if none is provided anyway, otherwise it's mostly meaningless.
Downvotes are essentially useless in lemmy, and that has proven to be a good thing. It adds nothing and just proves that for some reason a large accounts are tagging your comment negative. If the comment is really bad, plenty of other options to deal with it. It isn't even a cohesive concept for everyone, some people upvote and downvote everything, they cannot think of a world where maybe you just don't have an opinion about something because you are either not interested or its outside of your scope of knowledge.
I do think that the differences in downvotes on Lemmy are overall beneficial. Reddit had this problem far worse - but I still think that opinions should be attached to words. It's a social platform: if you don't want to interact that's your prerogative. While I acknowledge the existence of them I rarely let them direct my statements. It's not batons and tear gas.
That said: I agree with your final statements... not everyone needs to participate in every conversation (we can still read and form opinions.)
Objectively how you feel about a call for brigadeing a particular viewpoint? Yes, I will give you that a lot of the shit posted by some of these groups is deplorable, but does that give us the right to simply ostracize the group as a whole?
You've made some good and valid points- I'm looking forward to your response. Cheers.