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.
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…
Oh photographers? Most of the ones I know are still on Instagram. Same with artists etc.
I can’t really leave that because of that.
Yaah… I could never get into Instagram. I had a flickr account from when it was owned by yahoo - I used to run a few yahoo groups and stored images for the groups there.
flickr’s gotten enormous now…
Oh yeah I never really liked Flickr. I used to do photos as a hobby but it was too serious for me and not social enough. I mainly follow photographers that have shot at cosplay parties I’ve been at. They’re all on Instagram somehow. And all the cosplayers too.
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…
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.
And yet at the same time playing the “we’re federated, trust us!” game. While holding all the important strings to themselves so it’s federated more in name than in actual practice.
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.