Life as a shorty shouldn’t be so rough.

Didn’t even have to check the link to know what it was. Classic.

Back in 2017, I didn’t understand how an extremely wealthy heir to a billion-dollar fortune (and regardless of all his business failures) could present himself as the candidate of the little people. Today, after Trump was president and - of course - only made policy changes for the rich, I understand it even less. What is this photo-op all about? Are there seriously still people who don’t understand that Trump has never represented the middle class - or even the working class? You can’t be serious, dear US citizens.

Wut?

By concepts of a plan, he probably means Project 2025, the plan that his “strategists” have drawn up to install him as a fascist autocrat if people are stupid enough to actually vote for him. It is hardly surprising that he does not want to comment publicly on this deeply anti-democratic endeavor.

It’s what AI makes of her, I guess.

That bothers me way less than seeing a single Trump tbh.

There is no point in arguing about that

It’s the best argument, tremendous, irrefutable.

Removed by mod

Ok, noted. Will try to do better. Just one more followup question: Why do you think my presumptions are unfounded? I mean besides that you seem to have faith in the good of all people and don’t seem to think that there is such a thing as computational propaganda.

Well, I guess we have to agree that we disagree then.

Is your argument that it’s okay to spread hate and slander without providing any evidence as long as people aren’t getting paid? Also, what makes you so sure that these are private accounts?

I’m sorry you’ve had a bad experience. Nevertheless, I think that a certain basic skepticism is important in social media, because it is simply a fact that many interest groups on the internet are fighting for sovereignty of interpretation and use enormous resources to assert themselves - even with very questionable methods. This of course makes it difficult to build trust and have an open discourse. The advantage of Lemmy, however, is that at least the platform itself does not interfere too much, like Meta, X or TikTok do. Therefore, it seems to me that there is a much higher probability that you will be heard with your opinion, message or whatever, if you can provide good arguments for your point of view. Sure, there are some viewpoints that users reject despite good arguments, but from my Lemmy experience so far, that seems to me to be the exception rather than the rule.

It is certainly true that other interest groups also engage in propaganda (or PR, as it is called these days) in both traditional and social media. But that’s not what this thread is about.

Anyway, you can perhaps even see something positive in the fact that the usual PR and opinion manipulation methods are now apparently also being applied to Lemmy, because this shows that whoever is responsible for these campaigns obviously ascribes a certain importance to this platform and thus also to the Fediverse - and that is somewhat of a good thing, I guess.

Exactly. I mean accounts that are typically not very old and exclusively spread right-wing content and the corresponding ideas - apart from perhaps a few low effort comments or posts that are most likely intended to conceal this fact. What makes these accounts even more suspicious to me is that they generally do not put forward any factual arguments, are not impressed by them in any way and are not even interested in a discussion. If you confront them and they respond at all, they always lapse into whataboutism or fall back on the familiar “I’m just asking questions” - both are strategies that think tanks in particular use to deflect attention from the fact that their claims and accusations have no factual basis. I can only conclude from such behavior that it is not about exchanging ideas with others, but about promoting a clearly defined world view, creating discord and aggression, tying up resources or forming a nucleus for belief in irrational assertions. I don’t think private individuals without a political agenda would do that - at least not to this extent.

What makes you think they are?

They even try to do this on Lemmy. I’ve seen a few accounts recently that were obviously created with the sole purpose of spreading right-wing propaganda.

Damn, you are indeed not joking. I had to double-check because it’s so ridiculous.