this post was submitted on 12 Jul 2024

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[META] A few words about Bots and Civility (lemmy.world)

submitted 4 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

53 comments fedilink hide all child comments

Given the state of technology, politics, and social media, we all share fears about interacting with bots, or having our social media manipulated. We know that this is happening on other platforms that are driven by engagement/profit models. However, Lemmy is about people – like you! While this platform is not immune to bots, we have several layers of protections in place to remove bots and trolls as quickly as possible.

Some of these operations are performed automatically at a server level, and you likely never see them at all. Some rely on the reporting system and the common sense of our userbase – that’s you again! If you believe that another user is a bot, please report it and our mod team will investigate. Please keep in mind that real people really do have radically different points of view. Not everyone who disagrees with you is a bot or troll. Do not abuse the report system.

We encourage the expression and discussion of different points of view, as long as the discussion is civil and in good faith. It is not a civil form of disagreement to call another user a bot or paid actor in posts or comments. It is a personal attack, which is a violation of our first rule. We have updated the language of the rule in our sidebar to reflect this. Our first priority is for the safety of our users to express their ideas. Thanks!

Be civil

Attack the argument, not the person. No racism/sexism/bigotry. Good faith argumentation only. This includes accusing another user of being a bot or paid actor. Trolling is uncivil and is grounds for removal and/or a community ban.

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[–] [email protected] 25 points 4 months ago (5 children)

A couple of years ago, before the AI boom, a guy on Reddit was absolutely convinced (to the point that he started Reddit stalking me over it) that I was a rogue AI. At one point, I even took a photo of myself (censoring my face obviously) holding up a napkin with his username written on it in sharpie. He said it was photoshopped.

My point is that once you make this sort of accusation about someone, the conversation is basically over. They'll never convince you that you're wrong and there's no point in talking to them if you're right.

[–] [email protected] 14 points 4 months ago (1 children)

He said it was photoshopped

That still kinda proves human interaction, wouldn't it?

[–] [email protected] 16 points 4 months ago

You've already surpassed the level of logic displayed by the guy Squid was talking about. lol

[–] [email protected] 12 points 4 months ago (1 children)

You should have recorded yourself solving a captcha instead /s

[–] [email protected] 7 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago) (1 children)

It's funny that there are browser plugins to solve captchas for you.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 4 months ago

Sounds like the sort of thing an bot would say to throw us off its tracks. ಠಿ_ಠ

[–] [email protected] 2 points 4 months ago (1 children)

You should have added extra fingers to the picture

[–] [email protected] 5 points 4 months ago

This was a good 2 years before AI images or LLMs being a thing.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 4 months ago (1 children)

Yep, I've gone extreme lengths and they always move the goalposts. At some point you just learn to block the weirdos who think "If they disagree, they are a robot!"

[–] [email protected] 3 points 4 months ago

Non-engagement is the only rational response to 90% of the Internet.

[–] [email protected] 13 points 4 months ago (12 children)

If you believe that another user is a bot, please report it and our mod team will investigate. Please keep in mind that real people really do have radically different points of view. Not everyone who disagrees with you is a bot or troll. Do not abuse the report system.

What about users who clearly aren't literal bots, but seem clearly to be posting in bad faith? I feel like there's going to be a huge grey area between "this needs mod intervention" and "there's nothing hinky about this user's posting"

I completely get the reason for the rule, as it's not a real productive accusation and there's no way to know. I'm one of the people that talk about the shills a lot, but I actually make a deliberate effort (probably without universal success) to draw a distinction between "there are shills here" versus "I think you are being dishonest in some way, and here is why" versus "you are a shill".

Banning the third sounds pretty sensible. Are the first two statements still allowed? Or are those considered uncivil also?

It is blatantly obvious to me that particular users on Lemmy are being some kind of dishonest about their motives. So like an example: Swearing that you want the Democrats to win the election, and you're bringing up bad things about Biden as constructive criticism / so he can fix it and thus not lose the election, but also publishing objectively false disinformation about the Democrats on a very regular, like absurdly regular basis. There are a lot of users who have that weird type of disconnect or other reasons to specifically think they are propaganda accounts of some description. I think it significantly distorts the discussion here in a way which is very much not a good thing.

I actually don't see it being super common that people jump to the accusation of someone being a shill as soon as there's a disagreement. I do think there's such a clear presence of some kind of shilling effort that it's, more or less, universally accepted that it's happening and distorting the discourse. Are we still allowed to talk about it?

Again, while I completely get the reasons for the rule... I feel like a lot of this stuff is hard for mods to be the ones to make mod-action decisions about because it's impossible for anyone with any level of powers to know which users are being honest about who they are. Upvote bots and things are one thing, but I actually don't see that happening all that much (maybe because the mods are on it any time it happens). Just someone making a real account and posting propaganda 10x per day, though... are we saying the mods are going to let that happen (because it's not a bot account) and we the normal users are not allowed to call out those users as doing anything, if in our opinion they're doing it for purposes of propaganda?

[–] [email protected] 11 points 4 months ago (1 children)

I banned some of the most obvious and prolific shills from my instance and there was a small but noticeable drop in server CPU load. Their posts are not the cause, it's all the comments on their posts and the votes on all of that. Those are being discarded instead of processed.

Their effect should not be underestimated.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago) (1 children)

Is this Beehaw?

I remember seeing the defederation from Lemmy.world announcement, saying (as I remember it) that as much as they weren’t happy about taking that step, the flood of unwanted garbage was getting too overwhelming for any other realistic approach. I thought to myself, whoa that’s weird. Then I hung out on Lemmy.world for a while and said oooh this is what they were talking about, this is fuckin unpleasant.

Dude the tankies when I first joined Lemmy I thought were awesome; I went in and argued with them about the Ukraine war. I actually learned a bunch of stuff although not exactly what they were attempting to teach me. This relentless tide of single comments always on the same handful of talking points is something entirely different.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 4 months ago (1 children)

As if they have a script, I don't get it. You have to agree to a lot of historical revisionism to shill it tho.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 4 months ago

It was so weird. But enjoyable to me.

Actually, I remembered that I think I accused one of them, or many of them, of being bots, so maybe that sort of undoes my "no no I would never do that to someone just because they disagreed with me" thesis 🙂

The thing is, something really weird happened that made me think it. I said something along the lines of "hey this source is actually really good, I don't agree with the conclusions you're drawing 100%, but thank you for sending it to me I learned a lot" and got back a response like "how can you ever expect to learn anything if you're just dismissing sources out of hand etc etc, you need to open your mind and be open to opposing points of view, you're just being ignorant"... I don't remember it exactly, but it was a response that when I looked at it, I realized would be a sort of boilerplate comment that would serve as a generic hostile response to almost anything. And, by sheer stupid dumb luck, it happened that it was total non matching nonsense to this total unusual backwards degree as applied to what I had actually said, which was a sort of unusually friendly and open-to-discussion response.

It was like the "They Live" glasses came on, and I started looking at every response in the thread like that. Like what the fuck is this? Was that guy just not reading what I wrote and in some sort of hategasm where he was just typing anything... or am I in a bot lobby right now? What the fuck is going on?

IDK, I never really figured it out. But it was definitely very weird. Definitely some of the people in there were real human tankies and like I say I learned a decent amount by talking with them (for way too fucking long, IDK why). But it was, now that I think about it, my very first encounter on Lemmy with some user that made me wonder what the fuck was even going on on the other side of the keyboard because it made literally 0 sense at all, what had just happened.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 4 months ago (1 children)

Most of what you describe would be a case by case basis. This post applies specifically to calling another user a bot or a shill. Pointing out intellectual dishonesty or hypocrisy can be a part of normal discourse and can be done in a way that respects the civility of the conversation. Some of what you describe could be in violation of other community rules, depending on the details.

The best thing to do if you're unsure about a particular situation is to report it, and mods will review it. You can always message one of us about a situation if you are not sure or require additional clarification. People are allowed to disagree with one another, even vehemently, as long as they do so within the rules of the community.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 4 months ago (1 children)

Last question I guess; do you feel that misinformation or propaganda is any kind of issue on Lemmy right now? Like if you look at the posts and comments, does the overall conversation “look right” to you in that regard?

[–] [email protected] 5 points 4 months ago (1 children)

If you are speaking of Lemmy as a whole, that is a pretty philosophical question.

Misinformation is a violation of the rules of this community and will be removed.

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[–] [email protected] 6 points 4 months ago (4 children)

Yeah, I'm not a bot. I wrote a tasteful haiku in response to somebody's comment which literally said "write a poem", and it was deleted and I was accused of simultaneously being a bot and a white supremacist because somebody on a nothing website decided a meme Simpson's joke is for Nazi's now. I write haiku sometimes, how about that.

[–] [email protected] 11 points 4 months ago

You obviously should have written a sonnet.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 4 months ago

I don't know, following instructions is pretty bot-like to me, fam. /s

[–] [email protected] 2 points 4 months ago (1 children)

A nazi liking japanese culture.... very fitting.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 4 months ago

I am goaded.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 4 months ago (1 children)

Good idea to make it official, I'll float the idea of applying it to Politics and World News as well.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 4 months ago (1 children)

Do you mean float it with the users, or float it with the other moderators?

[–] [email protected] 3 points 4 months ago (1 children)

Other moderators. We already know how the users feel, lots of reports on it even though it doesn't technically break the current rules.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 4 months ago (1 children)

Hm… how does seeing a lot of reports translate into most users agree with these rules, though? How do you know it isn’t just a bunch of vocal users who like to do reports?

I mean, like I say I actually like the rule with some caveats, but I’d be curious to see the results of an informal survey or something instead of just assuming the volume of reports correlates well with what the users think is important. I don’t report misinformation, because I feel like generally mod intervention isn’t the way to address it, but that definitely doesn’t mean I don’t think it’s a problem (and actually a much bigger one than people being rude and unproductive in their way of responding to the problem, although that is also a problem yes.)

[–] [email protected] 4 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago) (1 children)

Well, that's where the discussion among the other mods comes in. :) I PERSONALLY feel it's a good idea, and I Iike the idea of News, Politics, and World News all being on the same page, but it's not solely up to me, nor should it be.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago)

But it is solely up to the mod team, and the users who like to bounce on the “report” button, and not the consensus of the community as a whole?

I mean… you don’t have to answer that. I’m not trying to get in an argument about it and you can do what you like obviously. I just was a little surprised to hear that this is the big problem people want to solve - I feel pretty confident that if you surveyed the user base outside the bounds of the report button, most people would feel as I do that the propaganda is a much bigger issue than the people who get rude about the propaganda.

I think also that a lot of my prickliness in this comes not from the specific rule but from wondering about the question I asked OP - like I say, as written it seems perfectly reasonable (sort of just a clarification on the personal attack rule). But it’s interesting to me the question I asked, is this gonna creep into a “no talking about the shills or you get banned” or “no pointing out inconsistencies in another user’s story” rule.

One question I am curious about; do you personally feel that propaganda accounts are a problem at all on Lemmy? Do you feel like anything should be done to address that, in cases that aren’t bots or obvious sockpuppets or other things that can be administratively detected with surety?

[–] [email protected] 2 points 4 months ago (1 children)

thank you. this has been a problem since at least November.

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