Is it just me, or does it feel like Lemmy is being hit with a wave of political spam?

The most powerful country in the world is a large disinformation piñata. You whack it with a few memes and poor decisions come out.

You can’t fault hostile intelligence for giving it a go, and there are a lot of hostile intelligence services.

https://lemmy.world/u/UniversalMonk

One week old account. 684 Comments. 383 Posts. That's 152 posts/comments a day, 9 an hour, and most are over a paragraph long. Almost all of them focus controversially on third-party advocacy in the middle of an election year.

Not saying this account is a bot, but a person would certainly have to be spending a whole lot of time on lemmy to be posting this much in one week so it certainly feels spamish.

I subscribe to communities and only read what I'm interested in. So I didn't notice anything. But I know lots of people use Lemmy differently and read the "All" feed. That might be an entirely different perspective.

Tl;dr election year in the US. It's only going to get more intense until the actual election.

On one hand, I hate election years.

On the other hand, as The Economist once had a cartoon pointing out, it could be worse.

It's all about the longest running election campaign in the world. The US elections. I don't understand why it needs to be this long 😂. France, the UK, India (over a billion people!) can announce and complete elections quicker than the US.

I would love some more intelligent and nuanced spam filtering but, honestly, I don't think we'll get anything soon enough.

It'll get better in November, but then we'll get a wave of spam about stolen elections. And then better again in January when they finally finish the election game.

Outside of the news and actual politics subs, the only political spam I see on the reg is posts like this complaining about political spam.

Haven't seen that. But I have seen some users who spend every moment of their lives posting to sway opinion on an issue of their choosing. And if I accurately assess them as Russian paid trolls, I get all my comments removed and I get banned. So that's awesome and fair. Their content stays up, protected by mods. What an awesome feeling.

Yeah we're all subject to the mind virus that is US general elections.

It's US election year and this is (primarily) an English language site. Is that really a surprise?

Rather than block lists, just subscribe to the lemmy communities that interest you and don't subscribe to political/news communities. Then view lemmy through the "subscribed" feed rather than the "all" feed - no political posts - problem solved.

It’s been bad for a bit with the tankies here taking every opportunity to make some variant of “genocide Joe” comments but refusing to discuss any of the choices we had and the result of those choices.

They got super-quiet when Biden dropped out. Vanished.

Now we’re getting what appears to be a new wave.

First time?

Don't worry, day after the election they mysteriously vanish as if they were never real at all.

Would be crazy if it were all just disinformation campaigns throwing shit at each other for 12 months.

Luckily no one's stupid enough to fall for all that.

There seems to be a few people suddenly calling Biden racist too, and trying to say both parties are the same. If it quacks like a lobbyist, it is possibly a lobbyist..

But yeah. This is overall probably due to the election more than anything.

People like me (I'm Aussie) will even up vote some things simply because I can't imagine how bad it would be for Trump to win again.. For the entire world.

Keep in mind that American elections are coming up and Americans think the internet is only about them. So we're not only being dragged into this by disinformation campaigns.

Just blocked politics & news and my quality of life instantly jumped 200%. I highly recommend it. If something significant happens, you'll read about it in another community.

What is not flooded with political spam these times? And I am afraid we have not seen nothing yet.

Nope, keyword filters help

Even worse for us that live outside the US. Nothing but US politics every time we scroll. Well, that and Linux stuff.

It's been nothing but politics and memes (often about politics) since the first day I joined. I can only imagine how bad it is without my content filters considering how bad it is even with them.

It is election year in the US, a very polarizing election with two high profile wars, any social media will be weaponized

Yes. There's also been a spike of political commentors that seem normal until you engage with them, then they fire back with emotionally-charged nonsense full of contradictions.

I haven't really noticed much, but that's because I've taken to blocking political communities once they start bothering me by putting too many article links in the front page or being generally rageful.

I've literally been downvoting nothing but random political posts outside of politics communities and still they somehow worm into the hot feed. Mods should take a more serious "no politics spam" rule.

Not really, but I am from Europe so I don't subscribe to communities connected to US news or politics. Can you give some examples?

Filtering the names of popular political figures is leaving me with much less political news and the stuff that remains I am much more likely to care about than the usual gossip about celebrities, I mean politicians.

Everyone is being spammed with it. Tis the season

Absolutely, I had to immediately block the politics sublemmy. I noticed this change instantly as I always browse all. Suddenly my front-page was 95% politics posts. As if someone had flipped a lever.

Yep, and i understand that im on a western instance so western politics is to be expected but it was getting too much that All page is overwhelmed with politics to the point that i don't see posts that interest me anymore. So i just blocked political communities and also communities related to twitter. Now I interact more with the fediverse cause i actually get a chance to see things that i can relate to instead american politics.

Lately it feels like the bots have found Lemmy

I can also confirm that political discourse is becoming less civil / productive. Or at least that's what the increasing amount of such reports I'm getting, is telling me.

Yes. If you want to actually combat them, the best way is to contact your admins.

lol ikr its like it's an election year for a majority of the users or something cmon i wish we could go back to the days when lemmy did not have political posts back in 2020

I agree and if you want it to stop make sure this November you vote for Kodos for president. Do not vote Kang as he is a terd.

I haven't noticed it but I rarely look at the all communities feed instead of just my subscriptions. I do notice that a lot of users seem to be simply in the tank instead of maintaining healthy skepticism towards politicians. I also keep hearing "foreign disinfo" but that makes me chuckle. Of course it exists but it's not more potent than the domestic disinfo which is even more plentiful.

That's true of every social media platform, everywhere, before an election. Most social media companies are US companies or frequently visited by americans, but you'll find the same shit happening on foreign platforms too.

Why? Because it works. A lot of people end up voting based entirely on what seems to be the trend, so if you flood their feeds with enough propaganda, they flip.

And people with extreme views don't care about that, it just makes them feel like they're not alone and thousands of other people share their views and reinforces their narrow view of the world. And they feel entitled to be platformed too, because in their eye, everyone's going crazy and the world is really about to end. Just like a religion. Religious people genuinely think you're going to hell, no matter how sane your argument because their beliefs are more important than reality, because God is reality to them.

Its the american elections. I just ban these communities

If you, a potential voter, are reading something, then people trying to win an election will try to put information that will influence your opinion into those sources you are reading.

You must might want to check out !fediverse_vs_disinfo@lemmy.dbzer0.com. I started it recently to help people identify and report disinformation on the platform.

Thunder, the app I use on android, has a keyword filter so I don't see that junk.

Edit: I keep informed via rss. Lemmy is for fun so politics get filtered.

I thought it has always been like that?

Lemmy APIs are free of charge, so spamming stuff here makes sense from a financial viewpoint. It also makes it trivial to ingest the data for GenAI use.

Be real careful calling out or reporting a bot/troll. Some weak ass mods around that will ban you for either even though they say to report the mod...

Its election season boyos. You cant escape it, even in your fediverse hidey hole.

Consider using one of the Lemmy apps that supports key word filters.

Filter out the names of the parties and vice/prez hopefuls and you'll cut 90% of it from your feed.

Blocking communities you're not interested in is also helpful if you visit All. It's an uphill battle - I've blocked over 600 (sports and yiff porn probably account for 500 of those... jfc...) and still need to do some pruning, but my All is pretty personalized now.

Absolutely. They spam their own subs which limits reporting options. The mods of the popular subscommunities they spam don’t seem interested in doing anything unless a comment or post is an egregious/explicit/blatant violation of the rules.

The smart thing to do would be to block them, but I am not a smart man; I feel obligated to downvote them.

The good news, I guess, is Lemmy is growing to a size where following the Local (or All) feed is becoming a challenge. The bad news is Lemmy is still much too small for niche communities to be viable.

It's more of a permanent flooding situation, but, well, election year. I just block shit that gets to be a nuisance - some instances are entirely devoted to shrill screeching, some have legitimately decent communities that just aren't worth the astroturfing/doomposting/negativity/politics/malicious management/people being twats or 100 other reasons. None of it's missed, except it shows how much of a ghost town this is when you remove the ragebait.

I lost my (several pages long) blocklist in the kbin.run disappearance, Lemmy actually having instance blocking does a lot to make it easier to build back up. I do wish blocking an instance also blocked its users, which doesn't seem like the case.

If you only look at your subscribed communities you'll see much less of it.

Did they just charge their username?

I have blocked all the sublemmys that are doing it

Since Lemmy is an open source platform it is incredibly easy to build automated bots to spam it. I suggest looking for quality user Profiles to follow, and see what communities they posted on to find high quality communities.

Not the few communities I follow. Also I only read my Subscribed timeline.

I would love for a way to only see pictures if I click them, though.

Permanently Deleted

Uhh… a major party us presidential candidate was shot and the other one dropped out and anointed his controversial vp.

I haven’t been out here advocating third party voting for a tick now because there isn’t a serious line to compare against for either major party since those events.

If you don’t wanna see political stuff in an American election year then stop using all/active.

Just because you disagree with it does not make it spam.

If anything your post history looks like a spammer/troll.