Ben Gilbert describes himself on Bluesky, the social media app, as an “economist, lit and guitar nerd, rugby fan, owner of excessive pets.” A professor at the Colorado School of Mines, he rarely posts, but when he does, the subjects reflect his expertise in natural resources.
So it was odd when a video purporting to be a news report appeared on his account last month, blaming France’s financial and political support for Ukraine for police staff shortages at home.
Without his knowledge, Mr. Gilbert said, he had fallen victim to Russia’s latest tactic to try to spread its propaganda in the West.
His account, like hundreds of others on Bluesky, had been hijacked and used to post fake news articles, according to the company and researchers at Clemson University working with a collective of internet monitors who track Russian influence operations and call themselves the dTeam.
It likely doesn’t take too much for any group of coordinated individuals to significantly sway any social media. I mean, even on lemmy – if you had like 5 people who scoured ‘new’, or who had a program to scour ‘new’ posts for specific keywords, and just downvoted/upvoted specific content, it’d have an impact. Enough downvotes will hide posts from most other users, enough upvotes will amplify the message.
Similarly, if you look at who posts to lemmy, there are some folks with like 10’s of thousands of posts in a year, and those posts often follow specific ideological agendas. I once asked one of these sorts of accounts what their situation was, wondering if they were like a paid employee of a PR firm or something given that they had over 50 posts per day, and the response was “You have no proof”. I mean, a simple “Nah, I’m just passionate about certain topics” would’ve sufficed, but instead they chose to deflect the question and claim innocence via a lack of definitive proof. If I had ‘proof’ I wouldn’t have been politely asking/curious as to their response.
Social media is basically designed to be manipulated by propagandists. Doesn’t really matter what corporate structure is behind it, whether its federated or not.
Both likes and dislikes, imo. Bad actors and their bots can make it appear as though their stance is a widely held belief, they can dog pile dissidents, they often attack a straw-person for a point you never made to pull others against you and derail the conversation, etc.
With user level tools at your disposal, such as on BlueSky, you can at least coordinate a response to flag potential bad actors and even have the options to mute/block them by default. If your account were to be hacked and publishing disruptive content which was not something you would post, then your account could end up on these mute/block lists and you’d need to communicate the issue with the individuals that maintain these mute/block lists.
They are also here in the fediverse
deleted by creator
Such a hassle when Xitter is right there and lets them spread propaganda without any hacking.
Maybe it’s preaching to the crowd too much there. Their Facebook campaigns targeted every site of the political spectrum.
Hijacked how, though?
Shouldn’t 2FA be enough to prevent such things?
Hopefully, it’s fully decentralised 😂
Bluesky users are doing that all by themselves, no need for russia.
And they don’t seem to bothered with zionists talking about no innocent gazan and claiming the whole land belong to israel
Hey, I’m on Bluesky and it’s fine for certain topics. (lotsa photographers I like are there)
I have definitely noticed the pro-russia content, as the algorithm has started sending me more international news - when I subscribed to the news outlets that are local to where my mom and my uncles live - but now I’m getting european stuff?
Hmmm.
I come to lemmy for EU/international news…
I mean, Lemmy.ml is all pro-Russia. They don’t even have to “hack”
It would be a waste of time anyway, with the small Lemmy userbase.
Just pro-truth, really…
lemmy.ml user
Doesn’t argue against the point of the replied comment, just twists words to satisfy their narrative
I swear users from this instance are called to the mildest amount of criticism against Russia like the Bat-Signal. Or I guess Vlad-Signal in this case
And yet they’ll still tell you to remove your tinfoil hat whenever you mention kremlin cyber warfare/psyops
Bluesky has an algorithm?
bsky is backed by Venture Capital. Of course it’s gonna implement some kind of more advanced “get users more engaged” mechanism. It’s the “improvement to get people hooked” part of the enshittification strategy. You need users to be invested in the platform before you can squeeze for money and data.
The Discovery feed definitely uses something far more advanced than “show all the posts from this specific group of people from newest to oldest”
It has something as the nature of my feed changed. I’t’s also been inaccessible for me a lot more lately, so I’m back to flickr for the photo stuff.
I mean. I only had Twitter in the beginning to keep track of new albums and concert dates but that doesn’t mean it’s not a severely problematic platform.
