Russian influence operations expand to BlueSky
With initial efforts aimed at swinging upcoming German elections and discrediting Ukraine, Russia's "Doppelganger" influence operations have expanded to the BlueSky social media platform. It took the Russians a while to get around to it, but they've finally begun running their disinformation operat...
That's how you know you've made it in social media
"Being infiltrated by Russian bots" is the new "being bought out by Big Tech", I guess
I wonder if they'll ever notice this place. Like. Before a big election or something.
I swear they're already here. We got a couple stubborn conservative plants doing nothing but posting disinfo day in and day out. The mods of !conservative@lemmy.world are particularly sus.
LMAO, what a sub... I don't what I expected going in, but it certainly wasnt a crypto scam as the first post. More like conservative @ my ass
That's basically what the ml and hexbear instances seem to be. Or at least there's a lot of them there.
Notice this place? Lemmy?
The place made because "Fuck the white supremacist Reddit admins, want me to set up a self hosted one for /r/communism?"
That place?
That's the one!
Well. Sort of.
You are commenting in a post linking to "kyivinsider", whose article sources its information from "alliance4europe", this is literally state propaganda. I don't mean to say it's disinformation because the content of the article is probably true, but this is evidence that state propaganda is already rampant in Lemmy and we should be aware of it.
At least this anti-Ukrainian spam seems to get flagged as such in my polish corner of Bluesky. Wondering how long that will last and if we’ll see Jack Dorsey doing fascist salutes on stage too.
As far as I know, Jack Dorsey left Bluesky almost a year ago: https://www.businessinsider.com/jack-dorsey-bluesky-twiiter-nostr-interview-2024-5
His interview on the topic: https://www.piratewires.com/p/interview-with-jack-dorsey-mike-solana
I have to somewhat agree with him that Bluesky is still very much susceptible to turning into Twitter all over again. Right now, it definitely feels like Twitter in its infancy but with all the modern QoL features we expect to have nowadays. Which is nice, of course. Twitter didn't used to be such a toxic shithole of bots and disinformation, it used to be a powerful communication tool for activism and journalists covering rapidly evolving events live.
However, the endgame of such platforms is inevitable. Higher user saturation means higher operating costs, which then usually means the company has a higher reliance on advertising, which then leads to more algorithms and data mining for targeted ads, which then leads to easier mass political manipulation campaigns.
I'm not sure if it's actually possible to attract mass audience without an algorithm driven model. Mastodon tried and it's had some moderate success, but because it's completely devoid of algorithms, users have a harder time discovering people/accounts/mindless entertainment. That's the only reason I can think of as to why Bluesky took off so much faster.
Mastodon tried and it's had some moderate success, but because it's completely devoid of algorithms, users have a harder time discovering people/accounts/mindless entertainment. That's the only reason I can think of as to why Bluesky took off so much faster.
I'm sure that's a factor, but I can think of another reason. Decision paralysis when picking instances and frontends has been cited quite often as a substantial hurdle.
Wouldn’t want to be getting any criticism in your feed of an authoritarian far-right dictatorship, now would we? Can’t have these tankies calling for elections or banning Nazi symbols!
I remember there was a time on the internet where "Don't feed the trolls" and "True story, read it on the internet" was a thing. Would be nice if they were a thing again. Even in this thread, obvious trolls are being engaged and motivated to spew their filth.
it is normal because the platform is growing and then BSKY public blocklist will be bigger to counter this.
It's always been there, it's easier to moderate them out than it is on the alternatives. Would rather still be on bsky/mastodon than whatever the fuck.
Oh, good. I was worried we might actually get to keep a platform free of garbage. Whew. Can’t wait for all those conspiracy nuts to join in too!
/s
Seriously, if someone would just off Putin, that’d be great. Let Russia fall into a little civil war as smaller leaders fight amongst themselves for the scraps.
Just curious. Would you support a civil war in now openly fascist USA (see support of genocide and nazi salutes in presidential inauguration)? I don't support civil war in either because that's a horrifying outcome for the population of both.
i was hoping for a purified echo chamber because that's clearly what this world needs more of.
That is the western propaganda for justifying diminishing Russia. "If we are lucky a civil war fractures Russia into balkanized sections which the US/CIA will be able to keep divided and warmongering amongst each other. Blow up their oil. Yay!". Instead, Russians understand this war as defensive, and don't believe "NATO is a purely defensive alliance" BS, any more than non-imbeciles in west believe it, instead of willingly going along with the hateful propaganda lies because they have internalized their rulers warmongering profits as if it were a sports home team.
We can all be very thankful for Putin's restraint on nuclear strikes of US bases in Europe, or Aircarrier fleets off coast of Israel. If anything, opposition in Russia that would replace him, if impression was that Russia was losing/Putin approach was failing, would be more aggressive in ending the war once and for all.
I am not on that platform but I'll offer a:
This is how smaller communities die. They get infested with state actors and the paradigm shifts on some of the stupidest, dipshit topics.
Big ones too. Case in point, USA.
You are literally reading EU state propaganda in this very post, an article by "kyivinsider" sourcing its information from "alliance4europe", funded by the European Parliament and the Polish International Affairs ministry among others (according to its own website, feel free to check the link inside the article).
That doesn't mean that it's fake news or anything, the report is most likely true, just that it's really ironic that we're consuming state propaganda designed to make us worried about state propaganda from other "evil" countries (unlike our glorious EU parliament, not on a fascist downward spiral at all)
The nuclear block makes it a fools errand
I very much love the Bluesky block. Admittedly I am not there much, but still.
Gross
It's an information war like Hilary Clinton said.
The link goes to a site created less than two months ago kyivinsider. The source is from Alliance4europe.This is part of the DISARM Foundation, also know for AMITT (Adversarial Misinformation and Influence Tactics and Techniques) framework.
That one belongs to the Credibility Coalition, and that one to Meedan. A San Francisco based organization funded by the US National Science Foundation and many organizations like Meta, Amazon, etc.
The Russians are amateurs at propaganda in comparison to the US.
Propagandan is one of Kremlin's biggest tools, and it has been since the wall went up and it certainly never stopped when it came down.
Over time it has become the cheapest way for them for sow discord and infighting between their adversaries. Moving it online made it even cheaper and they've been at it hard the past decade or two.
Obviously the US have their own operations, but your point is not correct in any way. Look at what they've accomplished. The world is in chaos and they're largely responsible for a lot or even most of it, depending on how you look at the big picture.
I thought I was smelling some more of that over there lately.
"Thank you, AI !"
P.S. If Russians will be in Nurnberg court they will say something like "it's not our fault, it's putin's fault."
First of all, however shitty Russian regime is (you have no idea how I hate that crap), by the amount of crimes committed lately it's not worse than Turkey or Israel, or a certain superpower backing them. So if it is in that court, and those others are not, the fact alone will be ironic enough.
I'm getting tired of this 'whataboutism'.
It's the same 'third world' logic: "look, there is also shitty countries around us in the world. So it's ok if our country and we, like the people, are the same: with bad quality of education, without freedom, bad quality of life, living in fascist criminal state, illegally annexing territories, killing civilians, not respecting each other's boundaries (because we are "collectivists" and not individualists, who care about themselves. It's always ok to die for our dictator-criminal), we steal each other's things, etc. And it's definitely ok to change nothing. And it's definitely ok to act like barbarians and then not to take personal responsibility for your own actions."
It's YOUR country and we are talking about YOUR country and no one else. Don't look at others. Do not normalize that.
Hey bud, lemmy help you out. I think you've ended up on the wrong instance with your account. I think lemmy.ml should be your bee's knees.
this community is a psy op :P hang in there
Can they not just block these? I get that this is a never ending battle against troll farms and the like, but is BSky already falling to the "more engagement is better and we don't care if it's nefarious engagement" trap already?
There are many useful blocklists. But the average user isn’t informed enough to seek them.
I mean for the service to block them or eliminate the troll accounts. Not for the user to do so.
Bots. Bots EVERYWHERE
The problem of platforms when they become big. Just like cyber criminals lurk on systems used by the mass to exploit. Things can be used for good and for bad. And its often the small portion of bad that ruins it for large majority. Just like the few football hooligans that screw things up for the rest.
Bad intend or behavior is just hard to manage in a free online world. If Elon is hated then Adrian will take over....
The fucking Russian shills cried on Reddit resulting in permanent bans. They will be here soon enough.
Idiots don’t fact-check, and now we all pay the price. We can leave Twitter, Bluesky, Reddit, whatever—but nothing can stops them anymore.
Keep in mind that state propaganda doesn't equate misinformation. This very article is western state propaganda ("kyivinsider" using "alliance4europe" as a source for the article), and the report is most likely true. You don't need to strictly lie or misinform to create state propaganda, you just need to propagate your talking points and direct the public discourse to given topics. We're very concerned about Russian propaganda (and rightfully so) but, fuck, we've been literally supporting a genocide and all the state propaganda from our own western countries was directing ourselves in other direction, maybe we should worry about that too. We're literally consuming state propaganda right now in this article.
The amount of bots on that sh*tty platform is insane. I left it for Mastodon.
you know public bluesky blocklist (like this one https://bsky.app/profile/did:plc:e4elbtctnfqocyfcml6h2lf7/lists/3l53cjwlt4o2s) is very effective to counter those kind of thing right?
I'm subscribed to block lists and at least what I see looks pretty bot free.
"Russian influence operations" is a pompous way of saying that social media communities are big villages, and village culture gossip and bullshit and ape dynamics work there just as well.
Those "operations" are not significantly more complex than "bank support" calling you and saying you've got to tell them the 2fa code, or you lose all your money.
BTW, if something works well, it shouldn't be more complex. Just those people who designed social media to be vulnerable to such attacks - they should understand that social backdoors are just as universal as technical backdoors.
Ukrainian source. There is Ukrainian/western warmongering/self diminishing/impoverishing disinformation/narratives, including Ukrainian propaganda reposted verbatim such as this article. All counter narratives are labelled pro-Russian disinformation. Very common on all social media.
I have no idea whether there are some bot accounts on Bluesky, but it would be "not good" if Bluesky's bans are exclusively against anti-warmongering bots, to promote the Ukrainian/NATO bots/content, which on other social media, have deeply funded "SEO scoring" already.
bluesky itself is russian psy op
This is where it all ends. "Everything I don't like is Russia/China/Iran".
Nothing evaluated on its merits. Nobody with a view different from mine is real. Evil Foreigners is the explanation for every bad take and un-pc post. Americans are only ever loyal patriots, villainous traitors, or useful idiots.
I don't support Ukraine
I’m sure Russia will happily send you to the front comrade.
Used to dream of that when I was a kid. Glory to the motherland and all. But now - Russia is like a little us clone.
I too love genocidal regimes and war crimes. Can't get enough of that mass slaughter of civilians and kidnapping of children.
Yeah Lemmy too.
(edit: as in spreads to Lemmy too based on the brainrot I replied to)
Hey Ivan, the Russian infantry is looking for volunteers. Don't worry the NATO tungsten will be greet your worthless ass. Take the MAGAts with you!
And blocked.
the us knew what it was doing and ukraine has learned a hard lesson about having america as an ally. i didn't know how aggressively hivemind it was around here, its a little more like reddit than one would hope... 90 downvotes, that's like half the community :p give or take a few bots, i'm sure.
I think people downvote quite more readily to show disagreement here, not in the least because downvoted comments don't get buried.
And, like, seriously. If you can't even muster thoughts and prayers, if you can't even muster being indifferent, can't muster simply not leaving a comment at all, but have to shout your disapproval of Ukraine existing as a sovereign state from the rooftops, you're an asshole. Unambiguously.
In this case, probably an attention troll.
