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ZorbaTHut  1yr ago (text post)   45027 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 5, 2022

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Alternatively, people are herd animals and follow fashionable trends. The vast majority of reddit users don't comment at all, so a small increase in the number of comments from a particular sector (say, their candidate just won a primary) might look a lot like an entire site turning 180 degrees.

But what happened to all the people who were pro-Bernie and hated Clinton literally hours before? They should have still been there.

They follow what other people do - and - they want to get a non-racist republican elected.

The same happened with trump, right? Shouldn't all the anti-trump people have still been there after the primary?

You're telling me Bernie followers want to get a Republican elected?

sorry, was tired - i meant a "not-racist, not-republican candidate" i.e. a " non-(racist republican)"

It's documented that some groups do use bots to push narratives. Search "Hillary Clinton correct the record" and you'll find no shortage of articles about her PACs spending millions on users to adversarially engage with any posts criticizing her.

I'm having trouble finding the exact article I'm thinking of but the WHO engaged in similar funding of online accounts to combat covid misinformation.

If your assumption is something like "why would anyone waste resources on social media botting/shilling, it must not be happening", then perhaps you should revise your priors accordingly since bots and shills are used to shape narratives around even utterly meaningless shit like Meghan Markle.

Influence ops are definitely a thing. Your point may just as well be made to argue that they are easier to implement than one may think. I've seen a convincing paper analyzing twitter bot activity in influence ops around the war in Ukraine recently: https://arxiv.org/abs/2208.07038

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