Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy and other European leaders have applauded the US for passing a vital €89 billion aid bill which has been struggling to make it through the House of Representatives for months.
The House swiftly approved roughly €89 billion in foreign aid for Ukraine, Israel and other US allies in a rare Saturday session as Democrats and Republicans banded together after months of hard-right resistance over renewed American support for repelling Russia’s invasion.
With an overwhelming vote, €57 billion in aid for Ukraine passed in a matter of minutes, a strong showing as American lawmakers race to deliver a fresh round of US support to the war-torn ally. Many Democrats cheered on the House floor and waved blue-and-yellow flags of Ukraine.
I hate this calling idiots bots stuff. It’s like calling people NPCs. I think I’m getting old.
Yeah, the majority of them aren’t “bots”. It’s mostly people acting as useful idiots, parroting talking points put forth by Kremlin backed trolls. The shit reeks of 2018’s totally organic “Walk Away” movement – the arguments and slogans practically rhyme.
I don’t like the “bots” thing either since it’s inaccurate to what’s actually going on, but at the same time I don’t know a concise way to call out pretty obvious Russian state backed AstroTurfing.
The useful idiots are pumped up by bots upvoting.
I fucking hate the NPC thing specifically. The bots is one thing, you may not actually know if it’s an honest person or a paid bot, but to call someone an NPC is just dehumanizing people.
You do all sorts of shit to an NPC in a video game you’d never do to a real person. I hate that it’s normalizing dehumanization.
Kremlin propaganda is a huge problem and sticking your head in the sand isn’t helping.
You’ll have to clarify what you’re accusing me of here. Are you arguing that the people who support Russia’s invasion on this platform aren’t real people? That they’re not actually a combination of bootlickers and folks that actually believe any harm to American hegemony is a positive? Because there are a whole lot of the latter here because they’ve gotten banned from many other platforms, and not a great reason to spend the resources on the former.
I’m saying that your hand waving away the idea that there are bots on here is short-sighted and ignoring the problem is a terrible idea.
I’ll keep hand waving it unless you point to a real instance of a propaganda bot program on this laughably small slice of the Fediverse. A few comments are not fucking AI driven. The entire concept is ridiculous. Nobody’s building auto-reply bots to respond to many articles when we’ve only got a handful of people, like @MicroWave@lemmy.world , who even bother to post the fucking articles.
At some point, the “russian bots are really out on parade” comments are practically a Markov Chain response in their own right.
There would be less talk about them if there weren’t so many and Russia wasn’t known for botting propaganda every chance they get.
They are really obvious at this point.
Of all the automated posting tools circulating in the US, how many of them are Russian?