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1·1 day agoNot everything that happens in every single software company, university, and so on, all across the land, is because the government has “allowed” it. For one thing, a lot of cryptography research and software development happens outside of “the” country, far from anywhere that “the” governments would be able to allow it or not.
Actually, the US government in the 90s actually did make a really substantial effort to make it illegal to use cryptography that they couldn’t crack. Their efforts did not meet with universal success even before they abandoned them. That was the whole impetus behind T-shirts with the PGP source code (And tattoos! Seriously, one of my friends met somebody with a PGP source code tattoo, back when it was questionably legal to have one.) There are quotes by many many people about the limits of what the government is able to dictate to people that they are and are not able to do, even in very strict totalitarian societies.
You seem very confident in your opinion so I won’t try to dissuade you from it any further. Just taking a little time to try to shed some light. There actually are ways you can find out about how this stuff works in reality, though, to at least a little bit of an extent. Like I said, the Snowden leaks are a really good and fascinating way.
Best of luck! Starting from a standpoint of total skepticism and suspicion of everything online-related and government-related probably isn’t a bad place to start from, all things considered.
Lemmy conversational interchange in a nutshell lol
I wouldn’t be completely sure.
- The NSA doesn’t just do whatever is the worst thing for everyone at every given time. There’s no particular guarantee that the NSA will share any given communication with any given UK agency that wants it at the drop of a hat, although for major problems (like climate activists! those awful people /s) they may share pretty freely. E2EE is still a significant obstacle even if the NSA has it broken completely.
- There’s no guarantee that the NSA has broken it completely. Edward Snowden’s leaks about how the NSA had HTTPS broken are a fascinating and rare window into what the reality of their secret capabilities actually are. TL;DR, they either couldn’t or didn’t want to spend the resources to break the core encryption, so instead they arranged to smuggle subtly insecure master keys into vital places in the supply chain, so that they could exploit the flaws in those keys and read a significant fraction but not all HTTPS traffic (the fraction that was derived from those insecure keys). Of course their capabilities have improved since then, but so have the standards of encryption. I think the assumption “they can read some but not all encrypted traffic” is probably a good ballpark to use for their present-day capabilities, after however many years of both sides of the arms race continuing to evolve in tandem from that point.
0·2 days agoMaybe, but if that’s true, I think it happens on both sides of the political spectrum. Just as many Democrats engage in that as Republicans.
I do not think that American Democrats or Republicans are capable of running an operation that is anywhere near this successful. They are, for the most part, corrupt idiots. I’m talking about foreign influence campaigns which are designed to destroy the US by getting Republicans elected, not Republican influence campaigns which are designed to win by getting Republicans elected.
Also, Lemmy is overwhelmingly left-leaning. So in that case, isn’t Lemmy part of that surge trying to influence the campaign? They were heavily promoting all things Democrat, and heavilly downvoting anything that was third party or republican.
According to your logic, and your numbers, Lemmy is part of that influencing agent. And it seems to be trying to continue to influence things.
And since Lemmy is part of a political influence scenario, then that means you are too. As am I.
I don’t think Lemmy had any particular influence on the election, no, because of the small number of people here. I actually don’t think UniversalMonk is part of any influence campaign, personally, although there is no way to know. I just said I thought they were trying to influence the election, not that there was any detectable impact from it. Certainly as soon as the election happened, they switched from promoting Rachele Fruit relentlessly, to promoting conservative ideology just as relentlessly, which would seem to indicate that the Rachele Fruit stuff was purely a tactical front because of the election.
In a broader sense, separate from this individual user, it is absolutely well-documented that there are foreign influence campaigns distorting social media to promote electoral outcomes operating on a massive scale. I think that is why Trump got elected, and I think it’s why the far right is experiencing this massive surge right now all over the world, and liberal democrats like Biden, Trudeau, Scholz, and Macron are dealing with these insurgencies against their power which they’re not coping with well at all. I think the problem is actually vastly understated in the media. I think it’s one of the most powerful forces shaping world events right now, and it barely gets more than a footnote while the effects are talked about all the time in how politics is changing and new policies that are coming about because of it.
I am very surprised, as it sounds like you are, that it is on Lemmy. But also, it is very clear to me that there are influence campaigns on Lemmy, even if UM is not part of them. For whatever weird reason they decided that a few tens of thousands of MAU was enough to get someone involved in it. I think most people have a sort of anecdotal sense that it’s happening, based on the various tides of propaganda that come across from time to time, and I’ve seen users fuck up in ways that unambiguously indicated it (a random example being someone who claims to be American and preaching nonstop about Democrats, then using non-American numbering and then not understanding it when it’s pointed out to them that Americans don’t punctuate their numbers like they just did.)
My main point about the election is that Lemmy, I guess like literally every other social media outlet except maybe Signal or something, had influence campaigns operating on it. Any given group of a few tens of thousands of people was laughably too small to influence the election. But, by casting a wide net, I think they produced quite a significant impact on the election, and I do think Lemmy was a part of it.
(Most important) Monk posted to /c/politics at most about three times per day.
This is way off. During the October run-up when Monk was trying hard to influence the election, he was posting 10-15 times a day, which is about as much as anyone ever posts.
2024-10-21 | https://lemmy.world/u/UniversalMonk | 4 2024-10-20 | https://lemmy.world/u/UniversalMonk | 5 2024-10-19 | https://lemmy.world/u/UniversalMonk | 6 2024-10-18 | https://lemmy.world/u/UniversalMonk | 8 2024-10-17 | https://lemmy.world/u/UniversalMonk | 6 2024-10-16 | https://lemmy.world/u/UniversalMonk | 11 2024-10-15 | https://lemmy.world/u/UniversalMonk | 5 2024-10-14 | https://lemmy.world/u/UniversalMonk | 8 2024-10-13 | https://lemmy.world/u/UniversalMonk | 14 2024-10-12 | https://lemmy.world/u/UniversalMonk | 6 2024-10-11 | https://lemmy.world/u/UniversalMonk | 11 2024-10-10 | https://lemmy.world/u/UniversalMonk | 10 2024-10-09 | https://lemmy.world/u/UniversalMonk | 10 2024-10-08 | https://lemmy.world/u/UniversalMonk | 17That’s how many times only to the politics community, no other place, on each of those days.
TL;DR: Monk’s problem on /c/politics had nothing to do with and could not have been stopped by such a rule proposed in the OP.
This part, I 100% agree with. Discretion is always a part of moderation, and the fact that they didn’t exercise discretion and common sense with Monk (and in fact actively protected him by banning people who he egged into conflicts with him) doesn’t mean that we should set some kind of new discretion-free policy that will impact the heavy posters who do bring something good.
01·2 days agoMy comments requesting for the user please to not spam were also deleted, which formed a relevant part of my original report. I was in no way an uninvolved party.
It’s true that I felt that banning the other user was a lot more bullshit than deleting my comments, and talked about that too (as well as the leaving of the spam in place for some fuckin’ reason). But I had also received some sanction from the mods, my post was 100% within the letter of the rules.
I actually meant a different user, not UniversalMonk. This whole meta post stemmed out of some minor unrelated localized drama, I didn’t name the user because it’s 100% irrelevant to this whole discussion except in the sense of having sparked it off in the first place.
But also, UniveralMonk posted a lot more than 3 times. For anyone who’s an admin, the query if you’re interested is:
Huge SQL Query
WITH daily_post_counts AS ( SELECT DATE(p.published) as post_date, p.creator_id, per.actor_id as poster_actor_id, COUNT(*) as post_count, -- Rank posters within each day by their post count ROW_NUMBER() OVER ( PARTITION BY DATE(p.published) ORDER BY COUNT(*) DESC ) as poster_rank FROM post p JOIN person per ON p.creator_id = per.id WHERE -- Filter for the specific community p.community_id = ( SELECT id FROM community WHERE actor_id = 'https://lemmy.world/c/politics' ) -- Exclude deleted and removed posts AND NOT p.deleted AND NOT p.removed GROUP BY DATE(p.published), p.creator_id, per.actor_id ) SELECT post_date, poster_actor_id, post_count FROM daily_post_counts WHERE poster_rank <= 3 ORDER BY post_date DESC, post_count DESC;It’s actually a lot more interesting to look over than I thought it would be. It’s all pretty normal at the beginning, but then at the end of April, there starts to be a sprinkling of a multitude of pretty-bad-faith-IMO posters, all starting to be represented more or less at the same time. They all just kind of start up in a little sprinkling, and then at the beginning of July, that stops and it starts to be almost all either normal posters or return2ozma, and then in early August UniversalMonk shows up, and they’re both heavily featured from then on. They’re both competitive with the heaviest of the other posters, with UniversalMonk peaking I think at 17 posts in one day on October 8th. Then, in late October, UM gets banned, and it goes back completely to normal except for occasional bursts of single posters (Joker@sh.itjust.works being an example) popping up and doing super-heavy posting and then disppearing as they get banned.
I also see at least one of the heavy productive-post posters, that people don’t tend to hate the posts of, dropping out of the rotation, when they used to be heavily featured. That to me is a really sad thing. I have no idea why, sometimes stuff happens, but to me it seems at least a little bit likely that they got driven away by the periodic floods of propaganda and nonsense infesting what was just a normal news community, which would be really sad if that’s how it happened.
Ha. My input for what it’s worth:
I’m not sure about setting a hard-and-fast rule, in part because at present some of the heaviest posters are also the highest-quality posters. MicroWave often reaches 10-15 posts per day, and their contributions are clearly an improvement to the community. I wouldn’t want to set any kind of rule that would imply that they shouldn’t be doing that.
The issue with The Poster Who Shall Not Be Named was not only that, on some days, they were hitting 20-30 posts per day to this community alone, but also that the posts were of an amazingly low quality. In my mind, proper moderation should take account of that kind of thing and use common sense and responsiveness to community complaints, meaning we don’t need a special specific rule “please don’t make 30 crap posts in a single day.” The issue was mostly just that they weren’t contributing good things to the community, not that there is some upper limit to how many posts in a day people should be doing.
Edit: The Poster Who Shall Not Be Named is not UniversalMonk, it’s the poster me and OP were talking about that set off this conversation. Although, UniversalMonk is another useful data point for this whole conversation, and pretty much the same type of logic applies to them and any alts.
No sanction was imposed on spujb
True. Also, no sanction was imposed on the original user in question either. This entire issue is because of a message I sent the user explaining the issue with their behavior, and explaining what the consequence would be if they didn’t stop. At no point did I touch any moderation controls anywhere in this interaction.
If the user was doing this shit across multiple communities it would be different.
They absolutely were. See my longer comment elsewhere in the thread.
I don’t plan to weigh in all that much here, among other reasons because I feel like it’s mostly all been said about this situation at this point.
Other random response: Mine is a tiny instance (basically a glorified self-host), I was well aware of the context of what Cat was doing, partly because I was steadily getting reports about it. This was just the one situation that led me to decide something actually had to be done, or else I was enabling them to pollute the wider community in ways that the wider community was really being vocal that they didn’t want.
The hostility and belittling of other users who were telling them to cool it really rubbed me the wrong way also, yes. I left them alone initially because I thought maybe they were just sort of clueless about good participation on Lemmy but at the end of the day, what’s the harm, and it’s the mods’ business not mine. Once people are trying to have a reasonable conversation with you and you’re being hostile and snarky at them, your benefit-of-the-doubt level drops to a whole new type of category.
This take is wild, man.
Spamming: “Being too active”
Responding to user reports, after a long time of deciding they weren’t my business and ignoring them: “control freak”
Explaining the norms of the network this person is participating in, and backing up the consensus of the users of said network to try to address a problem: pompous bad faith reductive uncharitable threatening
You can think whatever you like obviously but this is some Peggy Noonan shit.
“How can you possibly say you DON’T WANT notifications about goods and services in your inbox, don’t you like getting activity? And messages?”
Okay, sure.
“There’s nothing wrong with posting ads for your home supplement company, which everyone hates, as long as you cleared it with the mods first and they said it was okay.”
That one’s probably a more accurate analogy.
The upvotes for this person’s point of view were pretty much unanimous. Most people clearly didn’t see it as negativity. Also, reports of the original user for spamming or unreliable sources are pretty common. IDK how the !news@lemmy.world rules are written, but in most internet communities, spamming the feed with low-quality content in large quantities is a violation of how you’re supposed to do things.
Also, the slapfight was not removed. One side of it only was removed.
There’s nothing wrong with posting as much as you want, as long as the moderators are willing to accept your posts and don’t reject them.
This is a super weird and authoritarian philosophy.
I get where you’re coming from, but imagine “There’s nothing wrong with posting Nazi content, as long the moderators are willing to accept your posts et cetera.”
See how insane that sounds? The moderators can be wrong. The users can be wrong. Everyone has their judgements, but the idea that it’s appropriate for people to become totally passive in the face of whatever the moderators decide, even if it is irritating them or seems wrong, because the space “belongs” to the moderators to do what they want with it, and the users need to leave if they don’t like that, is some bullshit.
IDK how this type of thinking crept into the internet. It didn’t used to be here.
It might be true, as a practical matter, that the moderators have control over their spaces. That doesn’t mean that by definition there is “nothing wrong” with what they are doing with it. That’s the whole point of this community here.
Makes perfect sense. Yeah, some people told me about them and I kind of left it alone, for overly long I guess in retrospect. They weren’t as bad the last time I had looked at them.
The more interesting question is, why are the lemmy.world mods coming out swinging for this user?
The sheer volume of it (again, 58 posts per day) and the sort of indiscriminate nature. I could make a bot that would repost random stuff out of the RSS feeds into other people’s communities, that doesn’t mean that it’s “more content” and good for those communities.
There were also some propaganda sources in there, RT.com among them.
- Ban spam: Normal
- Fail to ban spam: Understandable, maybe not ideal but people get busy
- Get mad at the people who don’t want spam: Okay? Maybe someone’s having a bad day
- Ban the people who don’t want spam, delete their comments leaving the spam alone: ???
Hitler’s mastery of mass media was one factor that allowed the Nazis to come to power. A lot of the checks and balances that resisted lies coming into the public consciousness didn’t work in the new paradigm, and he was able to exploit it and convince a plurality of the German citizens that up was down, right was wrong, and murder was justice.
Now, highly capable organized people have done the same on social media, for exactly the same purpose. We hadn’t even really gotten the Hitler paradigm fixed yet (as with Fox News), and now there is a far more powerful paradigm at play, and the people trying to resist it might as well be squirting a lion with a spray bottle.
You can add a switch inside the program which makes it give up its E2E encryption keys to some random third party who asks, who is able to demonstrate to the program’s satisfaction that they are from the government. I don’t know about this particular case, but that is the type of feature that governments periodically try to demand that software companies add to E2EE products, and it is exactly as bad an idea as it sounds like. And yes, Apple is being good by telling them “absolutely not.” They have also said the same to the US government several times now.
Very, very occasionally, governments have succeeded in talking people into doing this. On every occasion that I know of, people who are not the government have started using the feature to eavesdrop on people’s communications. Even though it means they have to lie to the software! I know, it’s terrible, the things that people do in the modern world.