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
Man, there’s like no day I don’t see another high quality version of this meme on Lemmy.
How many different upscaled versions do you people have exactly?
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.
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.
apparently, after a recent thread on lemmy and some reading, dorsey left bluesky some time ago
He quit and Mike Masnick, of Techdirt fame, replaced him which is a good upgrade.
Unfortunately, they still have Aaron Rodericks on trust and safety, who's cozy with Singal.
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!
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.
it is normal because the platform is growing and then BSKY public blocklist will be bigger to counter this.
The nuclear block makes it a fools errand
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.
Too many nukes
If they had any that worked, they'd have used them by now.
At this point, just do it. Humanity needs a reset anyway.
I am not on that platform but I'll offer a:
"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."
"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.
Bots. Bots EVERYWHERE
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.