He generally shows most of the signs of the misinformation accounts:
- Wants to repeatedly tell basically the same narrative and nothing else
- Narrative is fundamentally false
- Not interested in any kind of conversation or in learning that what he’s posting is backwards from the values he claims to profess
I also suspect that it’s not a coincidence that this is happening just as the Elon Musks of the world are ramping up attacks on Wikipedia, specially because it is a force for truth in the world that’s less corruptible than a lot of the others, and tends to fight back legally if someone tries to interfere with the free speech or safety of its editors.
Anyway, YSK. I reported him as misinformation, but who knows if that will lead to any result.
Edit: Number of people real salty that I’m talking about this: Lots
I’m pretty sure it’s Elon.
There are a shocking number of Elmo simps.
DOWNLOAD A COPY OF WIKIPEDIA NOW. RIGHT NOW. DO NOT WAIT.
WIKIPEDIA WILL BE RUINED IN (just guessing) THREE MONTHS (I hope I’m wrong)
Do download a copy of Wikipedia but give them some credit. This isn’t the first nor last attack on information freedom (see internet archive)
Can I get a TLDR. I’m on the page about downloading it, but there are so many files to download which makes me think I am looking at the wrong stuff.
Lemmy is too small to be a worthwhile target for musk-like campaigns. It’s usually just people escaping their echo chambers to get their rage fix. If you’re able to think for yourself, there’s really no negative impact and scrolling past is a great solution.
in a bot world no niche is too small to fill with digital garbage
Misinformation… you mean lies?
You can use true statements to spread misinformation, I guess.
How does that work?
Misinformation and lies are only separated by intent.
On lemmy, this is far more likely to be some weird tankie shit about western propaganda. Though it is definitely noteworthy that the far right and far left seem to push a lot of the same misinformation on here.
Also, in general lemmy trolls are super easy to spot because they don’t do anything else. All they do is whine about democrats or post Russian propaganda and never engage on any other topics.
Thinking of the most recent so-called “far left” thing I saw about Wikipedia, it was a video by BadEmpanada talking about the different portrayals of the Uyghur situation in China. A pretty balanced take btw, looking pretty impartially at all evidence and questioning the mindset of people with different perspectives on it. The discussion of WIkipedia there was that it does naturally take on some bias due to a reliance on Western media as authoritative or reliable sources. I think that is a fact. There’s a process to determine something as fact which I think is too quick, the second there’s something of a perceived consensus of experts or authoritative sources, something is stated as fact. In hard sciences, that’s typically fine, but in politics or recent history, IMHO you need a much more meticulous approach, because you’re in dangerous territory the second you start treating any propaganda narrative as fact.
There’s a lot of people posting lies and acting weird on Lemmy at the moment unfortunately. There’s been a sudden shift from evidence based to being an echo chamber
A few months ago you could have a discussion and people would exchange evidence. Now evidence no longer matters. People here have started acting the same as places like truth social unfortunately. It’s a pity and I do miss the real discussions here I used to have.
In fact, it’s part of the reason I’ve started to move back to Reddit.
Back when I started beekeeping, none of us wore any PPE and we kept getting stung. We started wearing PPE and it was better, but recently I’ve been stung a few times so I’m just going to do back to raw dogging it.
Yeahhhhhh.
In fact, it’s part of the reason I’ve started to move back to Reddit.
Lol, yeah cuz Reddit has no bots at all.
Great idea. Good bye
reddit has more echoechamber subs and lots of bots. its worse than lemmy.
its worse than lemmy
I recently was looking for help troubleshooting an issue and ended up checking reddit and I was shocked at just how bad it got. There were AI generated comments that seemed to provide a solution, but the link went to some spam URL instead of the product they were supposedly talking about (and these were recent comments, not old dead links). The kind of stuff you used to see on unmoderated comment sections on WordPress sites that nobody maintained.
The misinfo crowd has been twiddling their collective thumbs since the election and trump winning. Can’t make up bs about egg and gas prices anymore. They’re half-ass trying to incite intergenerational conflict between X, Z, millenials, etc. Guess they found a new target. Exact same MO. Repeat the claim ad nauseam, refuse to acknowledge any contrary argument, their argument is objectively false.
Those tactics won’t really work here but if there’s a small army of them on super low IQ platforms their lies can spread.
There are major issues with wikipedia, I say this as someone with thousands of edits. But I know exactly who you are talking about and they spread pure BS.
The last time I saw them their account was called “ihatewikipedia” or “fuckwikipedia” or something like that lol and they were just spreading conspiracies. Or useless drama. Like they were going on about how wikipedia “invades your privacy”, it IP blocks people and tracks IP’s linked to editing.
it IP blocks people and tracks IP’s linked to editing
Unless something changed, this part was at least partially true at one point. But only for anonymous edits iirc. Usually happened for IPs shared by a lot of people like from a campus or some VPNs, probably due to a lot of vandalism from such IPs.
Yes it does. That was my response to them. But this is pretty acceptable to prevent vandalism.
Read: some dork got very banned and intends to die mad about it.
There’s an option to donate on their website here: https://donate.wikipedia.org/ I’m starting monthly at $5 and possibly bumping up to $10 later on.
The wikimedia foundation has hundreds of millions of dollars in assets.
There was a big “information” campaign against donating to wikipedia say 6 months - 2 years ago, anyone know what happened/why?
really wish there was a way to pay with “Google play” because I found a way to get Google play money by lying to google lol
Opinion rewards?
Well, Google takes 15 to 30% off the in-app purchases made through Google Play, so you would probably be giving back Google their own money anyways, plus it would fool many people who might think they’re giving 10€ when actually they’re only giving 8,50€ or 7€ to Wikipedia and the rest to Google.
Better than letting that survey money expire and staying 100% with Google.
I’m donating 10 a month. Least I can do. It’s one of the last “good” places on the internet
On the contrary, seems like a lot of disinformation accounts are trying to elevate Wikipedia as a credible source. Seems to be coming from the same people pushing pro-western narratives. Which isn’t surprising, as western governments have been caught funding mass editing to promote western narratives.
https://www.wired.com/story/wikipedia-state-sponsored-disinformation/
I don’t think it’s a coincidence that the effort to elevate Wikipedia as “credible” has been ramped up during this genocide. The Zionists teach classes to their people on how to manipulate the site for their narrative.
https://amp.theguardian.com/world/2010/aug/18/wikipedia-editing-zionist-groups
On the contrary, seems like a lot of disinformation accounts are trying to elevate Wikipedia as a credible source. Seems to be coming from the same people pushing pro-western narratives. Which isn’t surprising, as western governments have been caught funding mass editing to promote western narratives.
https://www.wired.com/story/wikipedia-state-sponsored-disinformation/
I think you should read the article you linked to, and then reread the way that you summarized what’s in it, maybe make some edits.
I know how you’d like it to be interpreted, based on your original post. But anyone with a smidge of media literacy would see this article is pointing out Wikipedia has poured efforts into bolstering western narratives, specifically against China and Russia, and to promote pro-NATO narratives. But based on your post history, I don’t expect you mind that slant.
Here’s what Wired had to say when they weren’t quoting a Koch foundation funded study: https://www.wired.com/2007/08/wiki-tracker/
And just like that, I had an attack of perspective. Why am I in this conversation? Everyone watching seems to understand that you’re changing your story and talking nonsense, so it seems unnecessary for me to say anything else for their sake. And it seems highly unlikely that, on your side, you’re going to suddenly come to some kind of realization along the lines of, “You know what? Reality does have an anti-Putin bias, and quite a strong one, so it makes perfect sense that a source that made an attempt at publishing objective truth would be against Russia in terms of the ‘bias’ of a lot of the facts that it publishes. As well as being against Israel, NATO, or ‘the West’ in general, when those governments in turn do terrible things. I think I should spend less time carrying water for genocidal maniacs who happen to wear the right color hat, and start being reasonable.”
So I hope your talking points go really well. You’ve said that Wikipedia is terrible. Well done! Mission accomplished. Feel free to continue, I won’t stop you.
Edit: Changed to “anti-Putin,” I have no problem with Russia or Russians, just their government.
It’s not the anti-Russia slant that concerns me. It’s the pro-Ukraine/pro-NATO angle.
Good rule of thumb: if you’re having trouble figuring out who’s the bad guys, it’s the side with Nazi symbols on their uniforms.
Please keep putting “Ukraine are the bad guys” stuff right next to “Wikipedia are the bad guys” stuff. I promise, it’s totally accomplishing the mission and convincing everyone, and not at all a powerful living example of why maintaining free flow of information is an important thing, and no one particular government’s perspective can be trusted to define the “correct” type of narrative and media literacy. You’re killing it.
Sure. I’ll keep going.
Armies with Nazi symbols on their uniforms are the bad guys. Military alliances committing genocide are the bad guys. Common sense, right?
Philip would like everyone reading to believe that these organizations controlling what is permitted to stand as “truth” on Wikipedia is a good thing.
ETA: Keep the downvotes coming. When you’re flooding ‘Nazis bad’ and ‘genocide bad’ comments with downvotes, it reveals your manipulations for everyone to see. People need to know the narrative control is happening on Lemmy, too.
And this effort to drown it out helps people identify which accounts & communities are laundering this disinformation.
Weird how you can just look at the source and references in a wikipedia article to do your own research while articles like this are just “trust me bro it’s all a conspiracy”
So to clarify, you do not believe intelligence agencies are manipulating Wikipedia?
Which wikipedia article? Check the references of that article. That’s your answer.
Except the intelligence orgs and think tanks are also making up the source information. That’s how it works. They make up the initial info, launder it through a source, coordinate with the media to reference that source, get their editors to use the laundered info as a source in their wiki edits, etc. It’s a self-referential and self re-enforcing disinformation scheme. And it’s why western governments are working hard to ban opposition media outlets, deplatform anti-imperialist public figures, and ban/censor social media that allows anti-imperialist messaging through that challenges their narrative.
You should read up on “manufacturing consent.”
https://www.cato.org/commentary/how-national-security-state-manipulates-news-media
You should read up on “manufacturing consent.”
https://ponder.cat/post/962017/1196897
I realize you weren’t talking to me, but trying to pretend the people you are talking with aren’t familiar with propaganda systems, or trying to cite Chomsky as to why we need to let Wikipedia get corrupted, is absolutely hilarious. One of the absolute hallmarks of Chomsky’s work was that you need to evaluate claims in terms of the objective facts, and the definitions of the words involved, and not let whether it is “pro-Western” or “anti-Western” taint your evaluation of whether or not it is true.
I think that’s kind of situational. They were freaking out recently about the genocide being labeled a genocide on Wikipedia, and IIRC the ADL being labeled an unreliable source.
everybody click your wrongthink ⬇️ button, quick!
I was interested enough in what he was saying that I read one of his sources, and it says the exact opposite of what he’s trying to use it to justify. It’s actually pretty interesting how big the difference is that he either didn’t care about or didn’t even notice. Then, after that happened, I downvoted him.
Carl Sagan, prejudice versus postjudice, yada yada yada.
the article you’re talking about reads like a case of “our holy narrative-correcting taskforce vs their pagan misinformation agents”
[bad actors] put in the effort to build reputation…, mixing legitimate page edits with the more politically sensitive ones
through subtle changes like casting doubt on the objectivity of pro-Western accounts
they also mention adding links from Russian state-owned news, but the article doesn’t indicate that those things happen in the same incidents though mentioning it in the same sentence is certainly an attempt to conflate them. It’s one thing to remove insufficiently reliable sources, correcting misrepresented facts, and banning the wreckers that consistently produce it, but I think there is an issue if validly-sourced edits are being censored by “bias adjusters” (NPOV purposes withstanding) just because the content is deemed to have been written by a suspected bad actor.
the article you’re talking about reads like a case of “our holy narrative-correcting taskforce vs their pagan misinformation agents”
Sure, if you want to make this new, totally different argument, you’re welcome to. My point was that the original argument, that western governments have been caught funding mass editing to promote western narratives, was exactly backwards from what’s in the article. If you now want to say that funding mass editing for anti-Western narratives is a good thing to do, and it’s a bad thing Wikipedia making a “holy narrative-correcting task force” to try to stop it, then sure. You can.
Now I’m thinking you didn’t actually read the article. The entire thing is bragging about massive efforts enforcing western narratives on Wikipedia.
But considering your post history is a flood of western narratives, I understand how you wouldn’t be able to interpret that as a bad thing. You’re either a very enthusiastic volunteer in this effort, or getting paid for it.
But considering your post history is a flood of western narratives
https://ponder.cat/post/962017/1196897
https://ponder.cat/post/995769/1228100
Actually… when I was looking for a good third one, a random question occurred to me. Do you think Trump represents a violent force of Western imperialism? Are you worried about what Trump will do to accelerate various US crimes across the world, notably including support for Israel in its current genocidal activities?
When Trump won the election in November, the State Department suddenly canceled all approved leave for their agents, and called them all back to DC. Ever since then, we have bore witness to a brutal Biden/NATO led assault on the entire world. The militarized state is trying to cram their planned world war into a three month campaign, because they fear Trump will cancel their war.
So how can it be true that Trump will accelerate this brutality? While he is an authoritarian fascist, he’s also relatively isolationist, has called for defunding NATO, has called for bringing troops home & closing foreign bases. What do you believe would be a worse version of this? What more do you think Trump could do?
NATO and the intelligence sector believe Trump will deescalate this when he takes office. What do you think you know that they don’t? Why don’t you let them in on it?
I spoke against the bot farms. Their wrath is coming.
Is it space karen?
Wikipedia is an alien plot to get Earthlings to read more. DON’T FALL FOR IT!!! . . . ./s
Please donate to Wikipedia if you can.
I’ve heard wikipedia has alot of money anyway but i don’t know.
Wikipedia financials can be found here under Finances. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation
Here’s another good summary: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Guy_Macon/Wikipedia_has_Cancer
Many people say
What has that got to do with the price of fish?
did you reply to the wrong thing? or you specialize in bad jokes that are impossible for anyone to think funny?
Interesting all this WP news I’m hearing today. Last week I downloaded the entirety of Wikipedia. Anyone can do it, the base archive (no pictures) is only about 25G, although the torrent is slow AF, took me… almost 2 weeks to download it.
I did this because I feel like this might be the last chance to get a version of it that has any vestige of the old order in it, the old order being “trying to stick to ideals and express truth rather than rewriting history to the fascists’ specifications.”
I’d love to be wrong, but if I’m not, I feel like it will potentially be a good reference in the future if needed.
This is in the news because Wikipedia is refusing to rewrite history to the fascists’ specifications.
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cdrdydkypv7o
It’s possible that India will succeed at eroding by a little bit Wikipedia’s resistance to having things rewritten because of various powerful people demanding it. But, if you’re looking for an organization that’s resistant against those demands, I don’t think you will be able to find one that is anywhere near the equal of Wikipedia in terms of the scale at which it operates combined with the resistance it puts up when people do this.
Wow, they really sued the Wikimedia Foundation instead of trying to find a reliable source to refute the article’s claims. I looked up the edits they made. They removed content, citing various Wikipedia policies that govern how the article should be phrased.
In general, so long as the information is presented in a neutral, matter-of-fact manner and cites a reliable source, it can go in the article. Wikipedia’s job is to summarize what reliable sources say about a subject.
So all ANI would’ve needed to do was find a reliable source (preferably more than one) refuting the claims they want to refute. The most they’d likely be able to do is put both points of view in the article rather than removing one point of view entirely from the article, which is what they were trying to do.
Instead, they went to court about it.
That’s interesting and terrifying all at once. If the Indian government is successful, it will basically set the precedent for other powerful entities such as autocrats, oligarchs, and corporations to also force Wikipedia to edit their content to suit their desires. I donate frequently and will keep making sure they can win.
Shit. I better donate.
I donate every year and they made it easier than ever this year if you use Apple Pay or anything equivalent. Like 15 seconds and that includes chhosing amount.
edit: for us with the lazys
Thanks for posting this. I just gave my entire Apple Cash balance. I had no idea what I was gonna use it for and this seemed likea worthy cause. Wikipedia just got $140 because of you.
Kiwix is a self hostable option for this, and you can get other content databases as well, like wikiHow, iFixit, and Khan Academy.
The downloads are much faster than two weeks too.
Just some context, Hetzner gave the shaft to the Kiwix project and took down their content servers without any apparent notice (Kiwix’s side of the story at least), and they had to rebuild it with another provider.
Interesting, that’s too bad. Seems like it’s not an uncommon occurrence for Hetzner.
You just described the average Tankie around here lmao
I am pretty convinced that .ml is legitimately used as a Russian troll training ground before they get promoted to Facebook and reddit.
Meanwhile, at .ml:
Since Pi is infinite and non-repeating, would that mean any finite sequence of non-repeating numbers should appear somewhere in Pi?
Even the most extreme extremist of echo chambers will have benign random conversations. Singling out a random blurb of conversation, without even any source link, is just cherry picking.
It’s even worse when you link to the actual comments.
https://lemmy.ml/post/24032724
They are having an extended conversation about a question which has an actual real mathematical answer. The correlation between what mathematics knows about it, and the things the lemmy.ml people are trying to say about it with a tone of voice that implies they have some knowledge and you need to listen to them, is almost nonexistent.
There are, to be fair, a bunch of highly-upvoted explanations of the real answer, which is that we don’t know. But there are also plenty of top-level comments getting lots of upvotes, which say things like:
Yes, this is implied. It’s also why many people use digits of pi as passwords and make the password hint “easy as pi”.
Yeah. This is a plot point used in a few stories, eg Carl Sagan’s “Contact”
Yes
Yes.
And if you’re thinking of a compression algorithm, nope, pigeonhole principle.
Not just any all finite number sequence appear in pi
It’s actually extremely popular, it looks like, to just come up with some kind of random nonsense and then for one of the lemmy.ml people to be telling other lemmy.ml people that your random nonsense is the answer they’re looking for. When it comes out of the realm of politics and into the realm of mathematics, it suddenly looks really jarring and weird that they’re all so committed to sitting around handing out wrong answers to each other all day.
Are we saying it’s an echo chamber, or a literal propaganda training ground commissioned by the Russian government?
I’m not sitting here saying that one random thread I spotted when I jumped over there totally disproves either of those. It’s more of an amusing counterexample. I would LOVE if people would stop doing this thing where they expect you to defend an argument you didn’t make, I feel like I’ve pointed out it on this site 3 times in as many days.
That’s actually a really good way to illustrate what is wrong with lemmy.ml.
On math stack exchange:
Let me summarize the things that have been said which are true and add one more thing.
- 𝜋 is not known to have this property, but it is expected to be true.
- This property does not follow from the fact that the decimal expansion of 𝜋 is infinite and does not repeat.
On lemmy.ml:
0.101001000100001000001 . . .
I’m infinite and non-repeating. Can you find a 2 in me?
You can’t prove that there isn’t one somewhere
Why couldn’t you?
Because you’d need to search through an infinite number of digits (unless you have access to the original formula)
And:
Not just any all finite number sequence appear in pi
And:
Yes.
And if you’re thinking of a compression algorithm, nope, pigeonhole principle.
All heavily upvoted.
IDK if you’re allowed to link to lemmy.ml here or what, but the post ID is 24032724. The response to “You can’t prove that there isn’t one somewhere” - “You can, it’s literally the way the number is defined.” - is +8/-1. Plus the original guy pointing out the 10100[…] sequence is +21/-1. What are you saying is the issue? If it’s “they’ll just upvote anything that sounds right”, I think you’re gonna find that’s true on reddit, and true here, as well.
I’m saying the issue is that on math stack exchange, the people who actually understand the issues involved are generally the ones talking and being listened to. On lemmy.ml, the guy saying you can’t prove that a sequence of 0s and 1s doesn’t contain a 2 has +5 upvotes. You can look over the comments, and even more so than for politics, it’s just really apparent that there are quite a lot of people who have no idea what they’re talking about exchanging confident proclamations to each other about what it is that’s going on.
I’m not trying to hate on anyone for not knowing something. I’m hating on them for thinking they know something, and need to teach it to everyone else, when they are mistaken and haven’t made even the basic effort beyond “I just thought for 2 seconds and decided this is how it works” to figure out what’s going on.
On
lemmy.mlpretty much all reddit-like boards.You can’t really compare a stack exchange board about a specific topic with general purpose boards.
There are plenty of Reddit-like boards which feature people who generally know what they’re talking about. Reddit used to be one, years ago, remember jokes about how the comments were a better way to learn the truth of the story than reading the article?
There are places on Lemmy that are like that, too. Weirdly enough, this comments section is a good example. The people voting are extremely capable to identify the bullshit and downvote it, it’s actually very accurate. Just have a look around. It’s not always like that. Lemmy.world, Lemmy.ml, and some of the tech-focused communities are notable places where the idiots outnumber the rest of the people, but it’s not at all a universal feature of Reddit-like general purpose forums. It just takes a little while to build the culture that way, and a lot of Lemmy is actively hostile to building it because the wrong people are so aggressive about pushing the wrongness, and it kind of chases people away unless they’re cool with that.
I was thinking earlier about how fucked we are in the U.S., that the MAGA contingent, and to a degree the Dem contingent as well, have accepted mentalities that are incorrect and actively reject correction. That people (the population in general) are being trained to reject the fundamentals of logic, and associate all opposing viewpoints with an evil “other”.
In the comments they go into why it’s not even true that an infinite non-repeating sequence must contain all other finite sequences (10100100010000[…] example not containing any other digits). So it would follow that they wouldn’t contain all infinite sequences either. I think.
Yeah, there’s kind of a Poe’s Law situation.
A lot of the sincere tankies, though, at least want to talk about what they’re into, and have elaborate reasons why it’s all true. The low-effort “I can’t even be bothered to try to mount a defense, I just wanted to say Wikipedia is doxing its users and kowtowing to fascist governments, and now that I’ve said it my task is done” behavior is a little more indicative of a disingenuous propaganda account in my experience.
elaborate reasons why it’s all true
Usually it’s “just read these 10 hundred-year-old books” that they absolutely have not read.
And if you ask them to make a point from those books, they can’t. Apparently they’re only comprehensible as a whole.
This is an excellent suggestion for how to deal with this. I can’t thank you enough.
That’s now poe’s law, it would be Occam’s razor.
The most likely scenario here is not many puppet accounts spreading sarcasm or parody but rather that there are many actors that all true believers in what they are all saying. They sound the same because they are feeding off the same talking point.
You’re right, I was misremembering Poe’s law. We need a law for “there is no point of view so idiotic that someone won’t be out there passionately proclaiming it, not because they are a propaganda troll, but because they really believe it.”
Bro, why are you attacking people unrelated to the post’s topic?
Wikipedia source of truth?
That’s pretty bold.
Wikipedia source of truth?
That’s pretty
boldpeer reviewedFYFY.
Blanket statement is the argument of the uneducated.
I agree, but that… kind of seems like a blanket statement.
tiny penises in your pants?
that’s pretty cold.
I still want to have a copy of it when the world ends and I somehow survive. So I would say it is a decent source of truth.
