He generally shows most of the signs of the misinformation accounts:

  • Wants to repeatedly tell basically the same narrative and nothing else
  • Narrative is fundamentally false
  • Not interested in any kind of conversation or in learning that what he’s posting is backwards from the values he claims to profess

I also suspect that it’s not a coincidence that this is happening just as the Elon Musks of the world are ramping up attacks on Wikipedia, specially because it is a force for truth in the world that’s less corruptible than a lot of the others, and tends to fight back legally if someone tries to interfere with the free speech or safety of its editors.

Anyway, YSK. I reported him as misinformation, but who knows if that will lead to any result.

Edit: Number of people real salty that I’m talking about this: Lots

  • beefbot@lemmy.blahaj.zone
    4912·
    1 day ago

    DOWNLOAD A COPY OF WIKIPEDIA NOW. RIGHT NOW. DO NOT WAIT.

    WIKIPEDIA WILL BE RUINED IN (just guessing) THREE MONTHS (I hope I’m wrong)

  • FundMECFSResearch@lemmy.blahaj.zone
    842·
    2 days ago

    There are major issues with wikipedia, I say this as someone with thousands of edits. But I know exactly who you are talking about and they spread pure BS.

    The last time I saw them their account was called “ihatewikipedia” or “fuckwikipedia” or something like that lol and they were just spreading conspiracies. Or useless drama. Like they were going on about how wikipedia “invades your privacy”, it IP blocks people and tracks IP’s linked to editing.

    • lunarul@lemmy.world
      4·
      1 day ago

      it IP blocks people and tracks IP’s linked to editing

      Unless something changed, this part was at least partially true at one point. But only for anonymous edits iirc. Usually happened for IPs shared by a lot of people like from a campus or some VPNs, probably due to a lot of vandalism from such IPs.

  • RememberTheApollo_@lemmy.world
    606·
    2 days ago

    The misinfo crowd has been twiddling their collective thumbs since the election and trump winning. Can’t make up bs about egg and gas prices anymore. They’re half-ass trying to incite intergenerational conflict between X, Z, millenials, etc. Guess they found a new target. Exact same MO. Repeat the claim ad nauseam, refuse to acknowledge any contrary argument, their argument is objectively false.

    • Aslanta@lemmy.world
      71·
      1 day ago

      The politically elite are so used to puppeteering public sentiment with ease, and so confident in their efforts to suppress education in America that they have stopped trying to be sneaky. All American ‘news’ is propaganda and the this is a blatant attempt to divide the public on one of the last free resources for factual information**. Free as in non-criminalized. These types of posts by EM are to incite division in order to amp-up for the criminalization of information. And it’s not very difficult to see.

      **factual when readers uphold its integrity through critical consumption and editing.

      • JovialMicrobial@lemm.ee
        4·
        23 hours ago

        The ability to control the narrative of public discourse is one of the first things that needs to dismantled. The propaganda machine and it’s made up culture war/distraction needs to go.

        And the fact that it’s escalated to the point of wealthy elites trying to dismantle public access to information should be deeply alarming for all of us… because then all we have for information is what they tell us… and that’s a dystopia i have no intention of experiencing.

    • wowwoweowza@lemmy.world
      41·
      1 day ago

      Those tactics won’t really work here but if there’s a small army of them on super low IQ platforms their lies can spread.

    • kent_eh@lemmy.caEnglish
      2·
      17 hours ago

      They’re half-ass trying to incite intergenerational conflict between X, Z, millenials, etc.

      That’s not even new.

      Dismissively saying “OK boomer” has been around for several years.

      • RememberTheApollo_@lemmy.world
        3·
        17 hours ago

        Not the same.

        I mean actively blaming specific generations for political and financial issues. Yeah, we blame the boomers for a lot, but now the complainers are shifting focus.

  • Zier@fedia.io
    662·
    2 days ago

    Wikipedia is an alien plot to get Earthlings to read more. DON’T FALL FOR IT!!! . . . ./s

    Please donate to Wikipedia if you can.

  • auzy@lemmy.world
    923·
    2 days ago

    There’s a lot of people posting lies and acting weird on Lemmy at the moment unfortunately. There’s been a sudden shift from evidence based to being an echo chamber

    A few months ago you could have a discussion and people would exchange evidence. Now evidence no longer matters. People here have started acting the same as places like truth social unfortunately. It’s a pity and I do miss the real discussions here I used to have.

    In fact, it’s part of the reason I’ve started to move back to Reddit.

    • PhilipTheBucket@ponder.catOP
      1209·
      2 days ago

      Yeah, there’s kind of a Poe’s Law situation.

      A lot of the sincere tankies, though, at least want to talk about what they’re into, and have elaborate reasons why it’s all true. The low-effort “I can’t even be bothered to try to mount a defense, I just wanted to say Wikipedia is doxing its users and kowtowing to fascist governments, and now that I’ve said it my task is done” behavior is a little more indicative of a disingenuous propaganda account in my experience.

      • Serinus@lemmy.world
        807·
        2 days ago

        elaborate reasons why it’s all true

        Usually it’s “just read these 10 hundred-year-old books” that they absolutely have not read.

        And if you ask them to make a point from those books, they can’t. Apparently they’re only comprehensible as a whole.

      • Clent@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
        41·
        2 days ago

        That’s now poe’s law, it would be Occam’s razor.

        The most likely scenario here is not many puppet accounts spreading sarcasm or parody but rather that there are many actors that all true believers in what they are all saying. They sound the same because they are feeding off the same talking point.

        • PhilipTheBucket@ponder.catOP
          2·
          1 day ago

          You’re right, I was misremembering Poe’s law. We need a law for “there is no point of view so idiotic that someone won’t be out there passionately proclaiming it, not because they are a propaganda troll, but because they really believe it.”

    • socsa@piefed.socialEnglish
      3211·
      2 days ago

      I am pretty convinced that .ml is legitimately used as a Russian troll training ground before they get promoted to Facebook and reddit.

      • dx1@lemmy.world
        911·
        2 days ago

        Meanwhile, at .ml:

        Since Pi is infinite and non-repeating, would that mean any finite sequence of non-repeating numbers should appear somewhere in Pi?

        • vga@sopuli.xyz
          110·
          1 day ago

          Meanwhile actually at .ml: let’s deify a murderer because he killed somebody we don’t like and he’s fucking gorgeous. Nevermind that he’s a rich antiwoke Musk-lover, murder is cool.

        • PhilipTheBucket@ponder.catOP
          61·
          2 days ago

          That’s actually a really good way to illustrate what is wrong with lemmy.ml.

          On math stack exchange:

          Let me summarize the things that have been said which are true and add one more thing.

          1. 𝜋 is not known to have this property, but it is expected to be true.
          2. This property does not follow from the fact that the decimal expansion of 𝜋 is infinite and does not repeat.

          On lemmy.ml:

          0.101001000100001000001 . . .

          I’m infinite and non-repeating. Can you find a 2 in me?

          You can’t prove that there isn’t one somewhere

          Why couldn’t you?

          Because you’d need to search through an infinite number of digits (unless you have access to the original formula)

          And:

          Not just any all finite number sequence appear in pi

          And:

          Yes.

          And if you’re thinking of a compression algorithm, nope, pigeonhole principle.

          All heavily upvoted.

          • dx1@lemmy.world
            6·
            2 days ago

            IDK if you’re allowed to link to lemmy.ml here or what, but the post ID is 24032724. The response to “You can’t prove that there isn’t one somewhere” - “You can, it’s literally the way the number is defined.” - is +8/-1. Plus the original guy pointing out the 10100[…] sequence is +21/-1. What are you saying is the issue? If it’s “they’ll just upvote anything that sounds right”, I think you’re gonna find that’s true on reddit, and true here, as well.

            • PhilipTheBucket@ponder.catOP
              92·
              2 days ago

              I’m saying the issue is that on math stack exchange, the people who actually understand the issues involved are generally the ones talking and being listened to. On lemmy.ml, the guy saying you can’t prove that a sequence of 0s and 1s doesn’t contain a 2 has +5 upvotes. You can look over the comments, and even more so than for politics, it’s just really apparent that there are quite a lot of people who have no idea what they’re talking about exchanging confident proclamations to each other about what it is that’s going on.

              I’m not trying to hate on anyone for not knowing something. I’m hating on them for thinking they know something, and need to teach it to everyone else, when they are mistaken and haven’t made even the basic effort beyond “I just thought for 2 seconds and decided this is how it works” to figure out what’s going on.

              • dx1@lemmy.world
                2·
                2 days ago

                I was thinking earlier about how fucked we are in the U.S., that the MAGA contingent, and to a degree the Dem contingent as well, have accepted mentalities that are incorrect and actively reject correction. That people (the population in general) are being trained to reject the fundamentals of logic, and associate all opposing viewpoints with an evil “other”.

              • VeganCheesecake@lemmy.blahaj.zone
                6·
                1 day ago

                On lemmy.ml pretty much all reddit-like boards.

                You can’t really compare a stack exchange board about a specific topic with general purpose boards.

                • PhilipTheBucket@ponder.catOP
                  41·
                  1 day ago

                  There are plenty of Reddit-like boards which feature people who generally know what they’re talking about. Reddit used to be one, years ago, remember jokes about how the comments were a better way to learn the truth of the story than reading the article?

                  There are places on Lemmy that are like that, too. Weirdly enough, this comments section is a good example. The people voting are extremely capable to identify the bullshit and downvote it, it’s actually very accurate. Just have a look around. It’s not always like that. Lemmy.world, Lemmy.ml, and some of the tech-focused communities are notable places where the idiots outnumber the rest of the people, but it’s not at all a universal feature of Reddit-like general purpose forums. It just takes a little while to build the culture that way, and a lot of Lemmy is actively hostile to building it because the wrong people are so aggressive about pushing the wrongness, and it kind of chases people away unless they’re cool with that.

        • cm0002@lemmy.world
          62·
          2 days ago

          Even the most extreme extremist of echo chambers will have benign random conversations. Singling out a random blurb of conversation, without even any source link, is just cherry picking.

          • dx1@lemmy.world
            1·
            2 days ago

            Are we saying it’s an echo chamber, or a literal propaganda training ground commissioned by the Russian government?

            I’m not sitting here saying that one random thread I spotted when I jumped over there totally disproves either of those. It’s more of an amusing counterexample. I would LOVE if people would stop doing this thing where they expect you to defend an argument you didn’t make, I feel like I’ve pointed out it on this site 3 times in as many days.

          • PhilipTheBucket@ponder.catOP
            82·
            2 days ago

            It’s even worse when you link to the actual comments.

            https://lemmy.ml/post/24032724

            They are having an extended conversation about a question which has an actual real mathematical answer. The correlation between what mathematics knows about it, and the things the lemmy.ml people are trying to say about it with a tone of voice that implies they have some knowledge and you need to listen to them, is almost nonexistent.

            There are, to be fair, a bunch of highly-upvoted explanations of the real answer, which is that we don’t know. But there are also plenty of top-level comments getting lots of upvotes, which say things like:

            Yes, this is implied. It’s also why many people use digits of pi as passwords and make the password hint “easy as pi”.

            Yeah. This is a plot point used in a few stories, eg Carl Sagan’s “Contact”

            Yes

            Yes.

            And if you’re thinking of a compression algorithm, nope, pigeonhole principle.

            Not just any all finite number sequence appear in pi

            It’s actually extremely popular, it looks like, to just come up with some kind of random nonsense and then for one of the lemmy.ml people to be telling other lemmy.ml people that your random nonsense is the answer they’re looking for. When it comes out of the realm of politics and into the realm of mathematics, it suddenly looks really jarring and weird that they’re all so committed to sitting around handing out wrong answers to each other all day.

          • dx1@lemmy.world
            2·
            2 days ago

            In the comments they go into why it’s not even true that an infinite non-repeating sequence must contain all other finite sequences (10100100010000[…] example not containing any other digits). So it would follow that they wouldn’t contain all infinite sequences either. I think.

  • Supervisor194@lemmy.world
    912·
    2 days ago

    Interesting all this WP news I’m hearing today. Last week I downloaded the entirety of Wikipedia. Anyone can do it, the base archive (no pictures) is only about 25G, although the torrent is slow AF, took me… almost 2 weeks to download it.

    I did this because I feel like this might be the last chance to get a version of it that has any vestige of the old order in it, the old order being “trying to stick to ideals and express truth rather than rewriting history to the fascists’ specifications.”

    I’d love to be wrong, but if I’m not, I feel like it will potentially be a good reference in the future if needed.

    • PhilipTheBucket@ponder.catOP
      1352·
      2 days ago

      This is in the news because Wikipedia is refusing to rewrite history to the fascists’ specifications.

      https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cdrdydkypv7o

      It’s possible that India will succeed at eroding by a little bit Wikipedia’s resistance to having things rewritten because of various powerful people demanding it. But, if you’re looking for an organization that’s resistant against those demands, I don’t think you will be able to find one that is anywhere near the equal of Wikipedia in terms of the scale at which it operates combined with the resistance it puts up when people do this.

          • fusionsaint@lemmy.world
            10·
            2 days ago

            Thanks for posting this. I just gave my entire Apple Cash balance. I had no idea what I was gonna use it for and this seemed likea worthy cause. Wikipedia just got $140 because of you.

      • AutistoMephisto@lemmy.world
        15·
        2 days ago

        That’s interesting and terrifying all at once. If the Indian government is successful, it will basically set the precedent for other powerful entities such as autocrats, oligarchs, and corporations to also force Wikipedia to edit their content to suit their desires. I donate frequently and will keep making sure they can win.

      • Gestrid@lemmy.caEnglish
        7·
        2 days ago

        Wow, they really sued the Wikimedia Foundation instead of trying to find a reliable source to refute the article’s claims. I looked up the edits they made. They removed content, citing various Wikipedia policies that govern how the article should be phrased.

        In general, so long as the information is presented in a neutral, matter-of-fact manner and cites a reliable source, it can go in the article. Wikipedia’s job is to summarize what reliable sources say about a subject.

        So all ANI would’ve needed to do was find a reliable source (preferably more than one) refuting the claims they want to refute. The most they’d likely be able to do is put both points of view in the article rather than removing one point of view entirely from the article, which is what they were trying to do.

        Instead, they went to court about it.

    • OminousOrange@lemmy.ca
      35·
      2 days ago

      Kiwix is a self hostable option for this, and you can get other content databases as well, like wikiHow, iFixit, and Khan Academy.

      The downloads are much faster than two weeks too.

      • m-p{3}@lemmy.ca
        7·
        2 days ago

        Just some context, Hetzner gave the shaft to the Kiwix project and took down their content servers without any apparent notice (Kiwix’s side of the story at least), and they had to rebuild it with another provider.

  • douglasg14b@lemmy.world
    783·
    2 days ago

    It’s likely this is a bot if it’s wide spread. And Lemmy is INCREDIBLY ill suited to handle even the dumbest of bots from 10+ years ago. Nevermind social media bots today.

    • Willy@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
      18·
      2 days ago

      Ur a bot. I can tell by the pixels unicode.

      Edit: joking aside you bring up a good point and our security through anonymity cultural irrelevance will not last forever. Or maybe it will.

      • douglasg14b@lemmy.world
        4·
        2 days ago

        Unfortunately it won’t, assuming Lemmy grows.

        Lemmy doesn’t get targeted by bots because it’s obscure, you don’t reach much of an audience and you don’t change many opinions.

        It has, conservatively, ~0.005% (Yes, 0.005%, not a typo) of the monthly active users.

        To put that into perspective, theoretically, $1 spent on a Reddit has 2,000,000x more return on investment than on Lemmy.

        All that needs to happen is that number to become more favorable.

    • kava@lemmy.world
      141·
      2 days ago

      To be fair, it’s virtually impossible to tell whether a text was written by an AI or not. If some motivated actor is willing to spend money to generate quality LLM output, they can post as much as they want on virtually all social media sites.

      The internet is in the process of eating itself as we speak.

      • vga@sopuli.xyz
        21·
        1 day ago

        But something like Reddit at least potentially has the resources to throw some money at the problem. They can employ advanced firewalls and other anti-bot/anti-AI thingies. It’s very possible that they’re pioneering some state-of-the-art stuff in that area.

        Lemmy is a few commies and their pals. Unless China is bankrolling them, they’re out of their league.

      • douglasg14b@lemmy.world
        71·
        2 days ago

        You don’t analyze the text necessary, you analyze the heuristics, behavioral patterns, sentiment…etc It’s data analysis and signal processing.

        You, as a user, probably can’t. Because you lack information that the platform itself is in a position to gather and aggregate that data.

        There’s a science to it, and it’s not perfect. Some companies keep their solutions guarded because of the time and money required to mature their systems & ML models to identify artificial behavior.

        But it requires mature tooling at the very least, and Lemmy has essentially none of that.

        • kava@lemmy.world
          41·
          2 days ago

          yes of course there are many different data points you can use. along with complex math you can also feed a lot of these data points in machine learning models and get useful systems that can perhaps red flag certain accounts and then have processes with more scrutiny that require more resources (such as a human reviewing)

          websites like chess.com do similar things to find cheaters. and they (along with lichess) have put out some interesting material going over some of what their process looks like

          here i have two things. one is that lichess, which is mostly developed and maintained by a single individual, is able to maintain an effective anti-cheat system. so I don’t think it’s impossible that lemmy is able to accomplish these types of heuristics and behavioral tracking

          the second thing is that these new AIs are really good. it’s not just the text, but the items you mentioned. for example I train a machine learning model and then a separate LLM on all of reddit’s history. the first model is meant to try and emulate all of the “normal” human flags. make it so it posts at hours that would match the trends. vary the sentiments in a natural way. etc. post at not random intervals of time but intervals of time that looks like a natural distribution, etc. the model will find patterns that we can’t imagine and use those to blend in

          so you not only spread the content you want (whether it’s subtle product promotion or nation-state propaganda) but you have a separate model trained to disguise that text as something real

          that’s the issue it’s not just the text but if you really want to do this right (and people with $$$ have that incentive) as of right now it’s virtually impossible to prevent a motivated actor from doing this. and we are starting to see this with lichess and chess.com.

          the next generation of cheaters aren’t just using chess engines like Stockfish, but AIs trained to play like humans. it’s becoming increasingly difficult.

          the only reason it hasn’t completely taken over the platform is because it’s expensive. you need a lot of computing power to do this effectively. and most people don’t have the resources or the technical ability to make this happen.

      • ByteOnBikes@slrpnk.net
        4·
        2 days ago

        spend money to generate quality LLM output, they can post as much as they want on virtually all social media sites.

        $20 for a chatgpt pro account and fractions of pennies to run a bot server. It’s really extremely cheap to do this.

        I don’t have an answer to how to solve the “motivated actor” beyond mass tagging/community effort.

        • douglasg14b@lemmy.world
          1·
          2 days ago

          Heuristics, data analysis, signal processing, ML models…etc

          It’s about identifying artificial behavior not identifying artificial text, we can’t really identify artificial text, but behavioral patterns are a higher bar for botters to get over.

          The community isn’t in a position to do anything about it the platform itself is the only one in a position to gather the necessary data to even start targeting the problem.

          I can’t target the problem without first collecting the data and aggregating it. And Lemmy doesn’t do much to enable that currently.

        • kava@lemmy.world
          61·
          2 days ago

          $20 for a chatgpt pro account and fractions of pennies to run a bot server. It’s really extremely cheap to do this.

          openAI has checks for this type of thing. They limit number of requests per hour with the regular $20 subscription

          you’d have to use the API and that comes at a cost per request, depending on which model you are using. it can get expensive very quickly depending on what scale of bot manipulation you are going for

      • wizardbeard@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
        26·
        2 days ago

        The last thread OP participated in features a comment from OP countering something said about Wikipedia by wikipediasuckscoop. Looks like that’s who.

        • PhilipTheBucket@ponder.catOP
          271·
          2 days ago

          It only applies to misinformation that might cause significant harm to some organism, which doesn’t apply to this.

          Personally, I don’t think that LW should make the attempt to police misinformation completely, since it’s sort of a judgement call a lot of the time. I think it’s better that people be able to argue out whether something is true or false, or intended disingenuously or not, all on their own without the mods needing to decide for them, because misinformation has such a big grey area that you can’t make an objective determination and be right about it 100% of the time.

            • commie@lemmy.dbzer0.com
              736·
              2 days ago

              strongly recommend you look into Phillip’s own activity: habitually stalking users, accusing them of spreading misinformation, and hiding their true intentions. his presence is toxic as fuck, and I don’t trust their “analysis” one iota.

              • PhilipTheBucket@ponder.catOP
                283·
                2 days ago

                I think directly accusing people of spreading misinformation, explaining why, and letting them defend themselves if they want to, is a pretty good activity to do. Mostly, I only do it when something really annoys me, like for example someone claiming a free encyclopedia project for the internet is supporting genocide, kowtowing to fascist regimes, and many of their editors are quitting because it isn’t even safe to contribute to the project because they will dox you whenever asked.

                • commie@lemmy.dbzer0.com
                  532·
                  2 days ago

                  this is not the first time you have made spurious accusations of spreading misinformation. it’s toxic as fuck. I wish you’d just get out of the fediverse instead of launching new instances when people start to ban your account.

              • Deceptichum@quokk.auEnglish
                181·
                2 days ago

                So are you the same person as the linuxsucks and Wikipedia accounts?

                Because that’s the vibe I’m getting from your posting.

      • robocall@lemmy.world
        18·
        2 days ago

        Wow. Thanks for sharing that profile… that is dedication to the niche issue of smearing Wikipedia.

  • socsa@piefed.socialEnglish
    6621·
    2 days ago

    On lemmy, this is far more likely to be some weird tankie shit about western propaganda. Though it is definitely noteworthy that the far right and far left seem to push a lot of the same misinformation on here.

    Also, in general lemmy trolls are super easy to spot because they don’t do anything else. All they do is whine about democrats or post Russian propaganda and never engage on any other topics.

    • dx1@lemmy.world
      195·
      2 days ago

      Thinking of the most recent so-called “far left” thing I saw about Wikipedia, it was a video by BadEmpanada talking about the different portrayals of the Uyghur situation in China. A pretty balanced take btw, looking pretty impartially at all evidence and questioning the mindset of people with different perspectives on it. The discussion of WIkipedia there was that it does naturally take on some bias due to a reliance on Western media as authoritative or reliable sources. I think that is a fact. There’s a process to determine something as fact which I think is too quick, the second there’s something of a perceived consensus of experts or authoritative sources, something is stated as fact. In hard sciences, that’s typically fine, but in politics or recent history, IMHO you need a much more meticulous approach, because you’re in dangerous territory the second you start treating any propaganda narrative as fact.

    • Phoenixz@lemmy.ca
      1427·
      2 days ago

      Yeah horseshoe theory is an actual thing and it shows hard here on Lemmy. Same lies, same taxticts, different extremists.

        • Trainguyrom@reddthat.comEnglish
          91·
          1 day ago

          Dammit. That’s too funny and I want someone to share this with but nobody i know is the right mix of wierd to get it

        • Phoenixz@lemmy.ca
          49·
          1 day ago

          Yeah that’s just horseshoe theory with extra steps and gymnastics to be able to say that far left is okay, really, they never do anything wrong, trust me!

          Unless they do as tankies ARE the far left

          • PhilipTheBucket@ponder.catOP
            61·
            1 day ago

            It’s not any kind of judgment about right or wrong. It’s just an observation that some nutty behaviors like kicking someone out of your web forum the instant they dissent in any way, or openly defending your chosen government even when it’s killing people like they’re spraying for weeds in the garden, are unique to far-right individuals and tankies, and unknown and abhorred pretty much everywhere else.

      • socsa@piefed.socialEnglish
        124·
        2 days ago

        In this case it’s not so much horseshoe theory as it is that most tankies on lemmy are just trolls, or teenagers parroting trolls.