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There absolutely no way this isn’t an ad for upvote buying services lol this is so insane and transparent and the worst part is it’ll work
Have to respect someone getting in on grifting conservatives without even endorsing their views in the process.
In this case they do very much help those views though. Either they create the appearance of public appeal, which draws more people to these views, or they manage to disrupt spaces that formerly fostered a different political culture.
If we look at Twitter we see the second aspect particularly strongly.
Honestly, there’s and endless sea of grift attempts going on at all times. You don’t think people selling fake gold Trump coins, etc give one damn about his politics, do you? They’re just trying to wring every penny out of the die hards
Man, the cash I could make with flexible ethics.
Right? I was going to sell 5g blockers online when the pandemic started, but I have some semblance of a conscience… Also my wife threatened to leave me if I did.
Last presidential election here in Brazil there were some some traffic light salesman selling towels with the presidential candidates. And they walked around with a score board showing which one had sold more. And they sold a lot more because people didn’t want to see their beloved candidate on the losing side.
I have to respect the mall t-shirt kiosks selling poorly made trump merch right next to the equally poorly made Kamala merch. At least they’re just there for the hustle
How to milk the conservatives.
Keen observation skills. I wouldn’t have caught on, I’m sad to say.
It screams Steve Bannon.
I mean, it’s an ad but it’s also thought-provoking and interesting. Before now we all knew what was happening we just didn’t know the details also kind of interesting to see proof it’s a conversation starter. I think I would have preferred it if the author would have redacted the URL though.
buying a bunch of upvotes on a website dominated by bot accounts is a very cost effective way to run an AstroTurf campaign
“I thought trump was a terrible person, but the updoots be changed my mind”
Yeah sure. I mean there’s probably at least one or two feeble minded redditors like that but… Not a bunch. Especially if they’re confining themselves to right leaning subs.
Astroturfing is when corpos pretend to be grassroots
So, putting aside the questionable morals of this person. I’m not sure alt right reddit threads are the election swing spot they seem to think.
Why do I have a feeling this person has a vested financial interest in one of those upvote buying farms.
Who grifts the griftmen?
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“It is unambiguous clear that our message is toxic and the majority of people reject our ideology and us with it. Therefore, the most logical solution is to create an artificial narrative via manipulation and vote-buying that makes it appear that people like us.” -these people probably
Well, it worked with the news.
It also worked with Reddit. The Palestine discourse there is utterly repulsive and gleefully genocidal.
Is it really that bad? I haven’t been on Reddit in over a year.
worldnews is absolutely surreal and awful. Country specific subreddits are also getting worse and worse.
It’s hilariously ironic that I got banned from worldnews four years ago for criticizing the Saudi regime and how they use millennia-old scripture as justification to treat women horribly. Apparently that’s ‘bigotry.’
Everything I hear about the toxicity of worldnews these days is baffling.
Well, Saudi Arabia is an ally in all but name to Israel. Also both countries have excellent ties to large swaths of US politics.
Holy shit you’re not wrong. I just browsed the top of the week on World News for a good twenty minutes and there wasn’t a single post about the thousands of civilians that have been killed. I didn’t see a single pro Palestine post and anybody talking about the literal war crimes being committed over there we’re just downvoted. I think I agree with your word choice of “surreal.” It feels like straight up propaganda and they are all falling for it. Every post about Israel was just saying something about how they’re taking out the terrorists.
I really wish I’d just taken your word for it. That’s depressing.
That’s what they’ve been doing for decades. And unfortunately they’ve been very successful at it.
Or… I run a reddit botnet, and Christmas is coming up. What’s the easiest group of rubes to fleece?
probably the group that follows repub politics
Capitalism™
This is the equivalent of not being able to get your crush to like you, so you pay hooker just to tell people you got a girlfriend.
I bought Canada so I always have a Canadian supermodel girlfriend who just can’t be here right now.
Probably a scam, but congrats on discovering the Russian disinformation strategy from 2016.
Not exactly a scam. I still browse Reddit, and the Jordan Peterson Memes sub has been popping up in Popular for a few weeks, it had been a completely obscure sub before. The posts are ALL about US politics too…on a meme sub for a Canadian ‘life coach’
That’s because Jordan Peterson is one of the entry points to the alt-right rabbit hole. Despite being from Canada, his brand of grift is intricately tied to U.S. politics. If you have a very short amount of time, some people have put together some very short videos talking about Peterson:
https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLIK-x5uT6oS9EnO9-D6ePsWKOxtFhDZdF
Oh I’m definitely aware. The fact that some anti-woke content appears on the sub isn’t unexpected. The fact that it’s largely US political content is just a blatant display of meddling.
Ender’s Game was prescient text, regardless of Orson Scott Card’s personal beliefs.
Locke and Demosthenes are now armies of manipulative bots (but often real humans), shaping political discourse throughout the world. The Internet gave mind control powers to people with money, ambition, or both. We saw it with the Bernie Sanders and Trump movements in 2016 on Reddit, all too clearly for those who lived through an era where bullshit detection was a critical skill.
I was once fairly defeatist on this subject: the bad guys won, got Trump elected, and kicked off a new era of 80s conservatism that demonized progressive values like environmental conservation, freedom of choice in a number of matters, and equality.
But now, I’m starting to see young people stand up to their boomer relatives at Thanksgiving and bring facts and logic to social media discussions. And I have regained some hope that we will once again find a way to make the progressive “line go up“. Our society seems to swing like a pendulum between the right and left, over decades, and it feels like the Trump era was a swing too violent for most of us. It’s time to swing back.
Man, ever since the early 2010s I’ve thought about Ender’s Game a LOT - and it’s always this part of the book, never the zero-g laser tag or genocide-by-arcade-machine parts.
the Russian disinformation strategy
I’ll never understand why people attribute to the Russian government what was in the obvious best-interests of the Republican Party and the conservative movement.
If you asked who owns and operates the FOX News Channel, or Sinclair Media, or Clear Channel Radio, or any of the other dozen right-wing propaganda projects, I have to wonder how many people would reflexively insist “Russia” despite all of the money spilling in from the UK, Australia, Canada, Wall Street, Silicon Valley, and the O&G Industry.
I’ll never understand why people attribute to the Russian government what was in the obvious best-interests of the Republican Party and the conservative movement.
Maybe because there was a demonstrated and provable coordinated effort by the Russian government in the 2016 election to get Trump elected? Look up project lakhta. Russian election interference and the efforts of the domestic conservative movement can (and do) exist simultaneously.
What do you have against attributing to the Russian government actions that are demonstrably attributable to the Russian government?
I’ll be real, I have my suspicions regarding that whole scandal in 2016 because following the election there were like 2-3 days of quiet introspection by the Dems and then they aligned on “the Russians were pushing fake news that tricked everyone!”
My pet conspiracy theory is that it was already known within the political campaigns that these misinformation campaigns were happening and they chose to at that point publicize them and use that as their scapegoat. Same with the Russian spies they publicly outed that trump spoke with.
My pet conspiracy theory is that it was already known within the political campaigns that these misinformation campaigns were happening and they chose to at that point publicize them and use that as their scapegoat. Same with the Russian spies they publicly outed that trump spoke with.
Your framing is off. It’s not a conspiracy theory. It’s true that it was already known. The FBI investigation of Russian interference began before the election, not after. The investigation was being publicized before the election.
If you want to nurse a conspiracy theory about it, whatever. But you’re going to appear ignorant when you advance a conspiracy theory without doing the bare minimum of research into the known facts. You’re just creating a fictional narrative based on your “suspicions.” You’re not being “real.” You’re being ignorant.
I called it a conspiracy theory because it’s really just based purely off of observation and gut instinct and not facts. Good to know my gut instinct happened to be right though!
Your takeaway from my reply is that your instinct was correct? You’re going to make a great conspiracy theorist.
Their values are aligned, theirs strategies are aligned, and so their efforts are aligned.
Because there have been literal articles and reports by the FBI that Russian interference in social media has been a thing since the 2016 election cycle.
That’s why it’s been attributed to the Russian government. Because the Russian government actually did a ton of stuff.
there have been literal articles and reports by the FBI that Russian interference
There have been literal articles and reports by the FBI of domestic white nationalist organizing and domestic financing. Significantly more money and manpower is documented as entirely domestically organized, although a sizeable amount is moving between NATO and other Five Eyes states. We’re talking on the scale of tens of billions moving between domestic financiers - like the Mercers, Thiel, the Kochs, etc - and domestic fascist media/organizing. That dwarfs Russian state interventions. Its orders of magnitude different.
That’s why it’s been attributed to the Russian government.
Why do you search for the speck in your neighbor’s eye when you have a plank within your own?
Didn’t Clinton spend $40m on shareblue forum sliding?
Hey, remember what happened to Digg? Why a bunch of people moved over to Reddit in the first place?
I guess not a lot of people remember, so let me tell you.
Bunch of dipshits ran upvote brigades. Stories they didn’t like got buried really fast.
Now, Digg was a hive mind site to begin with - good luck posting anything the hive mind didn’t care about. But add blatant political machinations on top of that, and the site got unusable real fast.
Take a few guesses which political views those groups were trying to futilely promote while quashing opponents. Go on. (I’ll give a hint, some of them retreated to Conservapedia)
So that’s what killed Digg. …that, and the Digg admins were being dicks and the site redesign sucked ass. (…insert comparison to modern Reddit here)
I don’t remember Digg being infiltrated by right wing conservatives. What I do remember was a website with a community that dickrode its power users so hard that unless you were a figure like MrBabyMan, your content would not get a single vote. The only people who actually used Digg’s social features (i.e. Friends lists) were blog spammers.
IIRC Digg v4 tried to address the issue by making users subscribe directly to news websites and dedicated content creators. They hated it and flocked immediately to their competitor.
Reddit has the same power user problem, albeit 1000x worse. Say what you want about the people who gamed Digg’s front-page, but they didn’t have the power to be judge, jury and executioner when moderating communities.
That’s not what happened at all imho.
What killed digg realistically is that it had less control than Reddit and because Kevin Rose blocked posts about the DVD encryption codes and people over reacted to that block. For days digg was full of people simply reposting them (as Digg was worried about getting sued which was fair enough)
Didn’t really have anything to do with politics.
Don’t forget, this was back in the day of fat people hate and Reddit hosting child porn. Reddit administration was never great
Digg admins were actually ok and I never had an issue with them
Don’t forget, this was back in the day of fat people hate and Reddit hosting child porn. Reddit administration was never great
Reddit in the earliest days was basically 4chan but less controlled and more spread-out. There were thousands of illegal and horrifyingly abusive subreddits. Every single time one got taken down, it was this massive, whinging drama show from thousands of chuds screaming about their “rights” and “censorship.”
By the time admins came for the less overtly evil ones, like the weirdly prevalent communities dedicated to fantasizing about punching particular people in the face, reddit had very much become the WalMart of the internet. Not the cleanest or nicest place to visit, but it certainly had everything and was convenient if you needed a fix at odd hours.
I don’t even remember Digg but I remember it seemed relatively short-lived in the early days of the explosion of forum sites. A lot of people were trying to strike gold with the next big thing as internet popularity was soaring. There are likely hundreds of other big sites like Digg that people used to frequent that have also since died in the mass-extinction events of the 2010’s and beyond.
That’s only part of what killed Digg. The final nail in the coffin was when they redesigned the website to give power users even more power to control the front page than they already had.
Yep, as I tried to hint in the last paragraph. 😆
Digg’s biggest sin was that the votes were all that mattered, and the admins just leaned into that by coddling the power users. That’s why Digg got so toxic to random people who just wanted to share something cool they found. The last redesign just made it official that there are those whose votes matter and the unwashed plebs. Everyone already knew people were fucking with the votes, and the admins just said “go right ahead”.
So what Reddit offered was at least some assurance that the algorithm would combat blatant vote manipulation by power blocs and that people could share cool stuff fairly. Digg users promptly voted with their feet.
Now, to Reddit’s credit, the system worked for years. Admins absolutely condemned vote manipulation and actively fought it. People were actively against all sorts of vote brigading, and the admins listened.
Problem is, it all changed. Corporate media influencing came in, under radar. Political memefluencers came in, under radar. It’s all allowed unless it’s blatantly against policy and everyone pretends it’s just organic random users.
Now, you don’t see the Reddit admins talking about what made the site work so well back in the day. I’m not sure they’re interested in maintaining the anti-brigading and anti-manipulation algorithms. They’re this close to saying “fuck it, it’s a free-for-all” and going full Digg publicly.
lmao even if that happens i fucking bet NOTHING will change. too many people are just addicted to the site and even if it does we’ll just get an overload of turbo-redditors here
Those who don’t learn history are doomed to repeat it. Thanks for the quick lesson
But conservatives want to repeat history.
Just not the good parts.
I’m sure that they don’t have an economic agreement with that fake up votes website
Owning an “upvote company” is literally the only reason on God’s Earth that anyone could give seven shits about content and voting on reddit.
It may have had cultural impact back in 2016, but that was almost a decade ago and the world is different, reddit is different.
Now it’s just bots arguing with bots and every post is a surreptitious paid ad for something. People haven’t quite “move on” but they certainly don’t give reddit communities the relevance they once had. People broadly roll their eyes at reddit. In the last couple offices I worked in, the people joked that you’re “never allowed to share something on Teams if it came from reddit” and “reddit is a dirty secret, everyone knows we browse it, but it’s shameful to admit it.”
Sorry reddit, the cool factor has left the building a long, long time ago.
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The hope, I imagine, is that conservative subs are safe spaces where dissent can be controlled, and with enough purchased engagement, these posts can reach the front page where all the normal people gather.
Reddit was taken over by the right wing a long time ago. This person is out of the loop
I get the feeling that the Admins and management are pretty right leaning, but the mods and users are left.
It depends heavily on what sub you’re in for the mods and users,
But yes, the admin team is very right leaning.
What are you smoking, reddit is a liberal echo chamber.
Depends on the subreddit. Conservatives have made a conscious effort to take over moderation on various subreddits that represents individual cities often in blue states. Some have succeeded in that, others have failed.
This is just sad. How will this not get people sick and tired of it?
“Our opinions are wildly unpopular to the point where even if a bunch of us showed up we’d struggle to make a difference so we’re gunna need to buy upvotes!”
Like…c’mon.
The right may not have good ideas, organizational skills, charm, ethics, understanding of economics, history, or politics, or strength in numbers, but they do have the one thing more important than all of these.
Money!
I’d argue they do have organizational skills and and strength in numbers. Don’t underestimate that.
You don’t get and keep money without some of these skills though.
Have you seen the content there?
Yeah they’re gonna need lots of money to get any attention
I love the conservatives think that’s such cutting slander when really having a male politician who understands the need for feminine hygiene products by uterus havers everywhere is such a breath of fresh air
Fuckin’ yikes.
Oh wow, so it’s basically a content farm for /r/TheRightCantMeme
FYI unfortunately that sub got taken over by pro-russia and pro-ccp tankies.
One of the mod of the sub is also a hexbear mod.
Dumb enough to fall for a Facebook lie about Tim Walz, but smart enough to use a crappy image editor?
No, the Russians already provided the image with the lie
That’s pretty much US politics summed up, isn’t it? Ignore what they people say and throw money into it to get what you want.
People have gotten sick and tired of r/pics having loads of political content, and while some candidates are better than others, many people are sick and tired of seeing “orange man bad” yet again. The people who were supposed to be propaganda targets immediately knew this was propaganda and the rampant election posts didn’t make Harris more popular. If this plan is enacted, people will see the astroturfing straightaway, and more people will see Trump supporters as bothersome cultists than as freedom fighters. It doesn’t help that, if pro-Trump people can brigade the sub, so can anti-Trump people, and the whole debacle will just get shut down.
