I want to draw attention to the elephant in the room.
Leading up to the election, and perhaps even more prominently now, we’ve been seeing droves of people on the internet displaying a series of traits in common.
- Claiming to be leftists
- Dedicating most of their posting to dismantling any power possessed by the left
- Encouraging leftists not to vote or to vote for third party candidates
- Highlighting issues with the Democratic party as being disqualifying while ignoring the objectively worse positions held by the Republican party
- Attacking anyone who promotes defending leftist political power by claiming they are centrists and that the attacker is “to the left of them”
- Using US foreign policy as a moral cudgel to disempower any attempt at legitimate engagement with the US political system
- Seemingly doing nothing to actually mount resistance against authoritarianism
When you look at an aerial view of these behaviors in conjunction with one another, what they’re accomplishing is pretty plain to see, in my opinion. It’s a way of utilizing the moral scrupulousness of the left to cut our teeth out politically. We get so caught up in giving these arguments the benefit of the doubt and of making sure people who claim to be leftists have a platform that we’re missing ideological parasites in our midst.
This is not a good-faith discourse. This is not friendly disagreement. This is, largely, not even internal disagreement. It is infiltration, and it’s extremely effective.
Before attacking this argument as lacking proof, just do a little thought experiment with me. If there is a vector that allows authoritarians to dismantle all progress made by the left, to demotivate us and to detract from our ability to form coalitions and build solidarity, do you really think they wouldn’t take advantage of it?
By refusing to ever question those who do nothing with their time in our spaces but try to drive a wedge between us, to take away our power and make us feel helpless and hopeless, we’re giving them exactly that vector. I am telling you, they are using it.
We need to stop letting them. We need to see it for what it is, get the word out, and remember, as the political left, how to use the tools that we have to change society. It starts with us between one another. It starts with what we do in the spaces that we inhabit. They know this, and it’s why they’re targeting us here.
Stop being an easy target. Stop feeding the cuckoo.
…
Surely you can see there is not a contradiction between “there are elephants in this room” and “let’s talk about one specific elephant in this room”?
Dude, that’s how I see it. Sorry if that upsets you. Not sure what else I can say about it.
I’m not OP. I actually don’t think blocking them is a good idea. I think disagreeing with them in a particular way, and talking about the problem in general to spread awareness, is the right answer.
As I keep repeating, the politics or the substance of the disagreement has nothing to do with it. It’s to do with a particular argumentation style.
I actually think you could make certain rules for communities that had nothing to do with calling out propaganda accounts, that would do quite a lot to address this problem, simply because the accounts I’m thinking of depend so heavily on certain types of bad-faith behaviors that are problems regardless of who’s doing them or why.
Would it make you more comfortable if I made a separate post calling out particular types of behavior that I think are a real problem, and then we could talk about that without needing to accuse anyone of doing it because they are propaganda? I can do that. That actually might be a better way to go, because there are surely non-propaganda accounts which would be in that category which we should be addressing, and then there is no risk of someone being “caught up in the net” so to speak when they are genuinely not doing propaganda.
You said, more or less, that the issue is boxing out particular viewpoints. OP is clearly talking about behaviors and motivations (murky as that second one is to intuit), which is different. That’s the core of the misrepresentation.
The problem is that all of these work together. You’re in OP’s post, agreeing with OP, making assertions that you see these ‘behaviors’, while never once previously disagreeing with OP’s remedy. Severing out of a key aspect of their post, in one comment, at the bottom of a long comment chain, while only expressing agreement elsewhere? I think it’s fair for me to say you are boosting OP’s position.
Yes, that would have been a good route, rather than just agreeing with OP and talking evasively about fellow commenters being bad.
No, OP is most definitely attacking specific positions, not just behaviors. Here’s a position-agnostic version of their list:
These are generic behaviors that would make the post not specifically about a particular group of people that OP has an issue with.
The dead giveaway is the one I bolded, because OP’s version is specifying the Party itself, not simply the Left end of the political spectrum.
“Highlighting issues with Socialism as being disqualifying while ignoring the objectively worse positions held by the Democratic party”, for example, would run afoul of my “behavior-only”, version, but not OP’s position-specific version, so the only logical conclusion (which the rest of their comments definitely support) is that OP would in fact not have an issue with the behavior in that instance.
I think @Thevenin has the right of this issue in both of their comments: https://beehaw.org/comment/4660421
Side note: after our “discussion” a few weeks back, I went and read some of the interviews David Hogg has given since his Vice Chair win, and I’m pretty excited for how he’s talking about changing the DNC!
What’s your reaction to these parts?:
I will say that the two examples that come most clearly to mind for the proof requested in the first quote are two people who are in that category of “talks CONSTANTLY about how voting for Democrats would be a terrible thing that no self-respecting leftist would EVER do for any reason”, who also claimed to be American, who also made mistakes that no American would make. One of them used non-American characters to punctuate a number, and then when it was pointed out they got confused and didn’t understand what people were pointing out that was weird about their number. Another claimed that they employed a bunch of people and paid them all $250k per year (and, again, seemed not to understand that this was a wild thing to claim when people pointed it out).
Actually one of the tells of those accounts is that they will sometimes accuse others of not being pro-Palestinian, and being rabidly pro-Israel, which as far as I can tell no one on Lemmy is. There are specific useful reasons why I think they are making that accusation, but if I were just doing this as a way of disagreeing with people, why would I take some person who is making a pro-Palestinian point which I completely agree with, and decide that they are a propaganda account just so I can “attack” the viewpoint I agree with?
My take on a lot of this is that these sound like the strawmen positions that I’ve had levied against me before.
As in, especially during the last election cycle, I had people on BH who have no clue who I am (or that I would and did vote for Harris), trying to chastise me or accuse me of being a troll for “talk[ing] CONSTANTLY about how voting for Democrats would be a terrible thing that no self-respecting leftist would EVER do for any reason”, when in fact I was talking about Democrats’ failures in order to try to fix them.
The Democratic Party is at a huge crossroads right now, because it’s lost 2 elections to Trump that shouldn’t have even been close, and in both cases it was with candidates who either 1) had no primary to choose them, or 2) were in control of the Party during the primary. The fact that 2024 happened, and we’re still seeing these takes attacking Leftists (just calling them “fake” doesn’t make it so, no matter how much OP wishes it did), instead of saying, “hey, maybe the Centrist path of trying to work across the aisle doesn’t actually work to counter the alt-Right/ Trump-Right/ whatever you want to name their current brand of bad-faith political gamesmanship”, is breaking my brain.
We need to be discussing any and every viable path to fixing the party, not calling people who say the current incarnation of the party can’t win “doomers” or trolls, when many of our point is that we can win, if we fix the party.
You’re speaking in generalities, and I have no way to judge what happened or was likely the situation, from this statement. You could be describing a random Cyrillic character that wouldn’t be on a non-Russian keyboard, for instance, or you could be describing someone using a comma for denoting decimal places, which is something a British or Canadian would do, even if they’re living in the US. I’m not going to denounce someone sight-unseen based on what you wrote.
I work in infosec, and attribution is difficult under the best of circumstances. If I had IP logs, request headers, UserAgent strings, etc, I might be able to spot a foreign national impersonating an American, but I don’t, and neither do you.
I’ve seen at least 2 accounts on Beehaw, pre-election, who were rabidly pro-Israel. One of them disappeared completely after the election. The other I still see around, still often posting pro-Israel and Israel-apologist content and comments. So in my experience, your ‘tell’ is flawed by being based on a false premise. And that’s just Beehaw. Across all of Lemmy, including the center-right instances? There are absolutely staunch Zionists and pro-Israel users.
Well, since you’re asking me to surmise ‘why’ you might do that, my dime-store-psychology take would be that you’ve probably been influenced by the large amount of propaganda takes both pre- and post-election, that keep insisting that the pro-Palestine movement online was being driven artificially in order to divide the Democratic Party (as opposed to actually being a signal that Israel was in fact no longer considered ‘good’ among Dem voters).
After we lost, many pro-Israel sources (even in congress) have rushed to blame the pro-Palestinian movement for it, because it allows them to both set up the pro-Palestinian movement as an enemy to the party, and to deflect blame from Biden’s pro-Israel stances for contributing to the loss, both of which serve their interests.
You’ve had people accuse you of having no idea what normal American salaries are or how Americans write their numbers, while claiming to be a genuine American who was super-concerned about the election, and saying that was suspicious? What strawman position similar to that have you had levied against you?
Most of the people OP was talking about are not trying to fix the Democrats, and they’re often pretty explicit about saying that Democrats are as bad or worse than the Republicans and that they want to not vote or vote for third party candidates as a result. Obviously, advocating for a third party in itself isn’t suspicious or anything, it’s fine, but the particular type of guaranteed-to-be-counterproductive way that they’re doing it is what OP is calling out, I think.
I sort of get what you’re saying, that maybe someone has accused you of being a fake account because you criticize Democrats, and that’s how you read OP’s message. I don’t think that is what OP’s talking about, it’s certainly not what I am talking about.
I… what?
This has nothing to do with my question. I was pointing out that some of these fake accounts put on pro-Palestinian affects, and that I still think they are suspicious even though I am also pro-Palestinian. It doesn’t even need to be anything to do with the Democrats in this scenario. I feel like you read what I talked about but now you’re talking about some totally different scenario.
I am aware that there’s a whole establishment-Democrat theory that the pro-Palestinian movement itself was “fake” or not really valid. That’s 100% different from what I am talking about, and I don’t think that theory ever really got traction with anyone outside of DC or the establishment media. Actually I would specifically contrast something like the “uncommitted” movement as an excellent example of something that is clearly real, because it clearly shows concern for the Palestinian people and a desire to fight for a better solution, whereas the exact thing me and OP have been talking about and what makes it suspicious is people who seem like they’re totally unconcerned with making things any better, and just want to explicitly tell people never to vote for Democrats, and that’s the end of it and as far as it goes. Which, voting’s not enough sure, but refusing to do it at all seems totally counterproductive to anything good happening with immigration or Palestine. Totally different from what you’re talking about as your own behavior and advocacy.
Did that all not come through from what either of us said so far? You thought we were just saying that anyone who criticizes Democrats must be fake?
The tough part for me is that on the one hand, I want to believe that you are being earnest.
But the supposed prevalence of accounts who are both
does not comport with my experience on BH. Certainly not at a level to constitute a group large enough to be who this post is about.
And seeing as I have previously seen OP accuse people of being bad-faith actors, who were (imo) clearly just in disagreement about politics, I am not willing to extend a benefit of the doubt to them.
Also, you keep making latent accusations throughout your comments:
You haven’t even proven there are any, and yet half your comment is premised on them not only being present, but you having positively identified them. How am I supposed to take that claim as good faith?
This is the root issue with this post. OP is encouraging individual users to block people to create a walled-garden within a walled-garden. You say you’re not, but then what is the remedy you’re putting forth?
This thread is a witch hunt by definition, because it contains neither the means to accurately identify the supposed
witchestrolls, nor an actual workable, mutual, proper-process remedy. It’s literally calling for circumventing the mods with mob-action.Okay. You basically ignored most of my message, including some specific questions which I asked for specific reasons to try to get to the bottom of this. You just repeated your side again. So never mind.
This on the other hand is a pretty good question. So, one remedy I’d like to try is creating a moderated community specifically for political discussion, with a bot that can “oversee” the community and can identify fallacies or bad-faith engagement. LLMs aren’t really capable of following the thread of a conversation or picking the “winner”, but a lot of the stuff that pisses me off on Lemmy is pretty simple stuff to detect that I think they could do: Claiming that someone said something when they actually said something else, blatantly ignoring a direct question and instead going off and just talking about some different thing, repeating yourself forever without substantively responding to anything the other person says. That kind of thing. I think if there were a bot that could moderate discussions according to that kind of guideline and call people out in an unbiased way when they were engaging poorly, it would be hugely helpful. Because everyone does it, to some extent. It’s easy to get emotional or get heated up about the point you wanted to make, it’s easy to misinterpret something accidentally, and obviously everyone comes from a standpoint that their stuff is right (obviously right) or else they wouldn’t be saying it. I think a more neutral arbiter could help to point those things out without it being a big acrimonious mess whenever people disagree. Accusing another person in the conversation of bad faith rarely goes anywhere good. I think in general (if it somewhat worked) it could be a really cool thing.
And, getting back to your question, I actually think something like that would do a lot to address the type of engagement that I tend to talk about when I talk about fake accounts. It sidesteps the (basically impossible and highly polarizing / inflammatory) task of categorizing accounts into “fake” or not. If you have a political viewpoint that I or OP happen to think may be coming from a “fake” POV, but you’re just sitting there talking about it and engaging with people who disagree, it’s fine. That’s healthy. The problem comes in (to me) when people come in big gangs to all yell the same stuff, don’t really engage with people who disagree but just mischaracterize the opposition and repeat their points of view forever, basically just engage in bad faith. Whether those people are “fake” or not is still relevant, to me, but I don’t think just excising them out from your Lemmy experience is necessarily the way, and I definitely don’t think trying to publicly call them out once they’re “identified” by whatever specific criteria is the way. Because it is impossible to tell specifically for any given person.
Probably there are going to be 0 people who think that is a good idea. That is fine. I feel like the general street cred that AI in general has right now will lead people to hate the idea. That is fine. If I get motivation, I think I will just set the idea up and turn it loose, and if anyone’s open to play with it then see how it works out. That is my remedy.
You clearly aren’t intending this to be about this (OP’s) post, and yet…
I actually like your idea, and I think that it could work if there was some kind of set structure to the posts, maybe using a template to make it easy for an LLM to parse, and to prevent comments from asking more follow-up questions than allowed. My partner is involved with competitive debate, and I think a highly-structured variant could work in an asynchronous format like forums posts, especially if there’s a bot to auto-remove posts that aren’t formatted correctly (that part could just be a script with regex or something).
I realized, in the course of talking with you, that while me and OP have come to the same conclusion about what’s going on in Lemmy, the specific sets of behavior we are calling out are very different. But we’re describing the same underlying problem, we just have different perspectives on what we observed that led us to that conclusion.
I basically agree with OP’s characterization of a type of argument these accounts like to make that to me doesn’t make sense, but I just sort of suspect that there’s a big contingent of genuine users that also like to muster that exact same argument pattern also, or at least a lot of the elements of it. But again it’s probably pretty fruitless to start wildly speculating about which specific users are or are not “genuine,” unless they do some kind of really obvious tell that they are not what they are claiming to be. It is absolutely impossible to know.
Hm… this is an interesting idea. I was going to have it intuit the “main pillars” so to speak of each side’s argument, and then make sense of how well the other side was coping with each of the pillars. Not in the sense of assessing right versus wrong or reading sources or anything, that’s clearly hopeless. But just the basics: Are you addressing the argument directly, or are you just kind of stepping past it when you respond or pretending that it didn’t exist, or are you mischaracterizing it as something totally different and then beating up the strawman? That might seem like kind of a simplistic bar to clear but I think there is so much on Lemmy that would fail that type of test that it would be really productive to have an objective referee. For everyone. It’s surprisingly easy to fall into “my stuff is right, fuck all this other stuff, that is nonsense” type of thinking, it doesn’t even have to be anything wrong with you if the bot is dinging you for not addressing something.
Formalizing the thing and the format you need to provide could work too, it’s just an extra bar for people to clear and I feel like the LLM could probably do a half-decent job without it. I might try to knock up a quick version of it based on my idea but I’d be happy for any critique or other ways it could work.