Original post text
Given the recent detainment of a French person who got detained because he said something bad about the current administration in his WhatsApp messages. It makes me wonder if WhatsApp is truly end to end encrypted as they claimed. How did they even single him out?
As a corollary question, if I were to pass Customs, and if I delete WhatsApp , Reddit etc just before I reach the counter, will they be able to find out that I just deleted the apps minutes ago? I’ll be deleting them from my phone but keep them on the cloud.
It’s very easy to take over a subreddit or Lemmy community. Become friendly with the mods, then become a mod, then subtly harass and drive out (from separate accounts) any moderators who are standing in your way, then do whatever you want.
There is a whole industry of “reputation management” that specializes in distorting the narrative on the internet in favor of your company / your government / whatever. The question is not “are there gangs of Reddit moderators who are bad actors trying to distort the conversation,” the question is how many and who they are acting on behalf of.
Of course, Lemmy copied Reddit’s fairly silly and failure-prone model. Why they did that, I don’t know. On Twitter / Mastodon-style networks, you can do the same but you at least have to be a little bit sophisticated about it. On Reddit/Lemmy, it is trivial to do if you are patient about it and put some consistent effort into it, and you can make a ton of money if you can do it well.
Hmm. FOSStodon team:
And on Reddit:
Yep
Lemmy has open modlogs. Also, on Lemmy the instance owner can still ultimately override anything a mod does as they control the database.
That’s why it’s important to pick the instance for a community carefully.
And if, for example, this privacy community get overtake, other privacy communities can co exist in other instances.
!yepowertrippinbastards@lemmy.dbzer0.com is still a thing
!196@lemmy.world attempted takeover lead to !onehundredninetysix@lemmy.blahaj.zone
So I’m not sure it’s that easy
Yeah, but I think the 196 blowup was just home-grown hamhandedness. I don’t think that was anything malicious.
The moderation activities I’ve seen on Lemmy that I would interpret as malicious are a lot more subtle and do not show up on YPTB that I can remember. One example is anonymous /c/politics mods making malicious decisions (making it illegal to claim someone is doing propaganda, or running cover for UniversalMonk), and then shoving Jordan to the front to take all the heat for it. Another would be having a little tidal wave of accounts accusing one of the moderators (who is taking action against propaganda) of all kinds of sins, until eventually that person stops spending time on Lemmy again and the propaganda can stay.
I feel like the techniques for doing this kind of thing are pretty advanced at this point, and no one really has time to pay enough attention to counteract them. On reddit they can be more overt, because there’s not enough of a coherent community to notice or do anything about it, whereas Lemmy at least does have YPTB to keep it a little bit in check. So maybe on that score you are right, but I definitely don’t feel like YPTB means it’s not happening.
There was someone who did it professionally who showed up on Reddit at one point talking about their experience and techniques and it was pretty interesting and pretty depressing.
I’ll like to add something I’ve been saying for a while, the blocking capacities of Lemmy seem to be designed to allow for these propaganda instances/comms/users to stay at least visible, block an instace at user level? no biggie, you still have to deal with their users, defederated? no problem, someone from an instance that links both can just crosspost and it will appear on the feed.
This gets worse when we take into consideration who the devs are and the instances they own and their usage.
The problem is those propaganda users, aren’t just contained into those instances, as an example, I moved to an instance that blocks the 3 main propaganda instances but still the only news I keep seeing about my country (🇲🇽) are only those approved by the government… guess what is that called? If I try to call it out I get downvoted (yes, even with those 3 instances defederated), it’s hard to add proof because most critics were kicked out of every media company so they were left with their own blogs or youtube channels (in spanish, obviously) and bots quickly disregard those and there’s just so many that it’s impossible as what it feels like if I was the only mexican on Lemmy (I know I’m not, but feels like it).
I think YPTB only works if other instance owners and admins actually care about keeping order on their instance, but they are still humans, they can (and will) make mistakes or plain allow some mod to do their shit… because who the fuck knows, until it’s too much/late and they actually have to step in.
I honestly think the fediverse can work, but Lemmy isn’t it, it’s too lax and too easy to drown in propaganda… hard for anyone that doesn’t speak english and extremely easy to get brigaded if someone doesn’t agree with your instance/nationality (like what happened to mujico and more recently lemmynsfw).
Yeah. The whole model is broken. It works most of the time just because most people aren’t propagandists or assholes, but it is more or less helpless at protecting the cultural space against propagandists and assholes.
That didn’t really go under the radar
I know about this one, but let’s be honest, that mod was quite aggressive as well
Yeah, but YPTB didn’t stop it from happening. I do see your point that it eliminates and limits some of the harm, I definitely think it’s good to have around.
Yeah, but he wasn’t guilty of the multitude of sins he was getting accused of. The persistent myth was that he would bait people into disagreements with him and then ban them for it. In all the time of me asking for examples of that, people leveled a torrent of abuse at him (most of which was factually objectively untrue), and they finally came up with one factual example: Someone was saying that certain types of female / transfemale athletes were “freaks” and needed to have special rules applied to them. Squid asked for some clarification, then banned the person once they clarified that that’s what they were saying.
I do realize that he eventually had some kind of meltdown where he said some terrible things. I’m talking about his moderation before that happened, people had been harassing him for months before he actually did anything.
It’s the same with JordanLund. He has a weirdly establishment-friendly way of moderating, which I certainly don’t like, and so the accusation is ten miles past that: That he’s a vile racist piece of shit zionist who will delete any criticism of Israel. That is cartoonishly false and incredibly easy to disprove. But people keep saying it. Why?
I mean, it’s possible that it’s just Lemmy being differently-abled sometimes, but it feels different to me than just the randomly undirected failures of comprehension that are more commonly on display. That’s just my own judgement, not really anything factual, just kind of stating my opinion.
Can you guys give details? I’m kind of curious about who you are talking about and what’s the propaganda. It’s better to be on the lookout for it in any case.
So, leading up to the election, there was a very obvious tide of “let’s all vote for Jill Stein” propaganda on the political communities. Basically, linking Kamala Harris as hard as possible to the genocide in Gaza and the US’s current bad immigration policy, in cartoonishly lazy ways, and in ways that violated the site rules (for example posting dozens of stories a day with the same messaging, from the same account, apparently with the mods’ blessing).
It’s been fairly quiet since then as far as US politics. There are still some isolated communities that are clearly written with the exclusive goal of shitting on Democrats or boosting up Russia, but it’s not really a front-and-center feature of browsing Lemmy like it was pre-election.
So the mod who was harassed out was FlyingSquid. From time to time, people would have these extremely performative freakouts about how Squid was power tripping, banning anyone who disagreed with them and arguing with everyone, which had a grain of truth (the arguing part, sometimes, but not the banning part) but it all got blown up into some kind of emergency so consistently and so emotionally that it felt to me like some weird kind of deliberate campaign.
If you want to see another more recent example, check this out:
https://lemmy.world/post/27393569
Jordan is the mod being harassed and being accused of racism and censorship, in my view, there, with the persistently repeated myth being that he is a Zionist and will delete from worldnews any anti-Israel story.
And so on. Literally all he did is remove a link to Substack, and tell the person who posted it that they should post instead the same story from some more reliable source (of which he provided multiples they could use). A number of accounts then commenced a loud hours-long freakout about what a piece of shit he is. Literally the number two story at the time of posting was reporting on some of Israel’s crimes, which happens every day in worldnews.
It’s possible that that’s just Lemmy reading comprehension and virtue-signaling at work, and they’re ignoring the facts and trying to create alternative facts just because that’s a fun thing to do on the internet. My personal belief is that it is more malicious than that.
Thanks for the break down. I’ve seen Jordan criticize Israel multiple times, he’s never once defended them as far as I’m concerned. It does indeed seem like baseless malicious accusations.
There may be some combination of this and political partisanry going on. This isn’t the only thread where one moderator is suppressing criticism of big tech and big government. I might need to take advantage of that community for recording some stuff, thank you for pointing it out.
Thank you that is more likely.