Palantir may be engaging in a coordinated disinformation campaign by astroturfing these news-related subreddits: r/world, r/newsletter, r/investinq, and r/tech_news
Palantir may be engaging in a coordinated disinformation campaign by astroturfing these news-related subreddits: r/world, r/newsletter, r/investinq, and r/tech_news
According to the comments r/europe_sub and r/canada_sub might be involved as well.
Reddit was already compromised. For those that were there, there was incident that showed that most of the top posts made are made by a handful accounts on several subbreddits. Keep an eye for things like this, in fact you should be suspicious of .world and their actions.
Good thing I switched to .dbzer0.
Same here fellow sailor. Reddit made me feel transparent. Never going back!
Setting aside the veritable TITAN-loads of shady shit Palsntir is up to, it's also worth noting that Reddit's policy changes have made it clear that providing a platform for the spread of disinformation is a central part of its current business model, so I'd assume that not only is Palantir using it for that purpose, but that they are far from alone.
half of its already bots, so im not surprised and it usually the propaganda bots keeping up the engagements. Also i heard reddit wants to make thier post/account history mroe private so its harder to discern a bot.
Good evidence of astroturfing on Reddit. That Reddit took action and banned the Palantir agents only provides evidence that exposure of the op is the problem. Not evidence that Reddit acts in good faith.
Good evidence of astroturfing on Reddit. That Reddit took action and banned the Palantir agents only provides evidence that exposure of the op is the problem. Not evidence that Reddit acts in good faith.
A good question to ask, is what would happen if Lemmy was the victim of astroturfing. It's decentralized for starters and groups might not even reside in the same place on the fediverse. Also I expect Reddit has monitoring, analytics and tools that could flag behaviour rather than somebody having to go through logs trying to find patterns.
I think Lemmy and other federated platforms have escaped having to deal with these issues simply because someone attempting to astroturf will do it on the biggest platform. So Lemmy escapes not by any technical or administrative virtue but by being smallfry.
Corporatism leads to imperialism by the need to seek profits in new markets. Wherever we see lots of defense of imperialism, there is corporate backing behind it. That's why I think lemmy.world is astroturfed. There's a strong anti-communist and pro "free market" capitalist tendency on there. Posts that attack the Global South as the world's villains. On the other hand, there are also many people on lemmy.world that speak out against imperialism and capitalistic exploitation. But the recurrent waves of reactionary politics on lemmy.world indicate to me the presence of astroturfing trolls. This makes sense even on a relatively small platform like Lemmy because it threatens to become a nucleus for organizing against capitalism.
I mean if you read any Reddit that during the road to the recent USA elections, Biden should have won by an extremely large margin, and later , Kamala.
If we used Reddit threads of those months as reference, we'd currently been talking about how hard Kamala won
But she didn't
So yeah, take whatever is on Reddit, and now Lemmy, with an asteroid sized pinch of salt
Not saying those comments were fake, they certainly represent someone, now, wheater that someone is a sizeable amount of voters...
You guys can’t think there are seriously paid bots on lemmy. There are like 10,000 users. It’s basically a niche message board. Reddit is a valuable target because it has millions of users. Facebook, instagram, Twitter. These places are being astroturfed. But lemmy? I honestly don’t believe it. It doesn’t even have a core of users in any particular country. The small user base is spread all over the world. It just isn’t a target of these campaigns.
People are complicated. Everyone always points to “all that anti Kamala talk ended right after the election!” Yeah, maybe a lot of the pro-Palestinian anti Kamala people saying they wouldn’t vote for her stopped speaking so publicly because the reality of the other option sunk in. That doesn’t mean those people are paid trolls or bots. It means their argument got much more difficult when trump started plotting out his Gaza hotel. Those feelings are still legitimate. The feeling of not being able to sign your name to the lesser of two evils when that “lesser” is still funding and arming the genocidal force. People couldn’t swallow that on a personal level. But as soon as trump was elected, because it was one of two options, for the sake of not being angrily brigades, people stopped talking about it.
It’s a much more nuanced issue than bots on lemmy.
You in turn are overestimating how much effort is required for an established bot farm to add a platform to their system.
I used to see that shit decades ago in the phpBB days, you'd get accounts signing up to a board with 20 active users to post climate change denialist articles, even though the website itself had nothing to do with climate change. (Looking back on it now, the oil lobby was probably the first big user of internet forum astroturfing, but somehow nothing ever came of it...)
Exactly, it blew up exponentionally around 2016 and became of importance. That's when the US regime put Jessica Ashoosh in place.
All the clowns leaving Reddit bcs now with Trump 'Reddit isn't free' are a joke.
They have been living a lie
Snakes on a Plane and Bernie have proven that what you see online is complete bullshit.
Biden got the boot because he was a no-hoper and his party must have been aware of his cancer. Kamala stood ZERO chance.
It sucks to have to admit that Trump and his fascists are popular. Very popular.
Oh no, sounds like I should avoid this reddit you speak of. Any suggestions for alternatives?
Versions of them are here already. Their focus right now is to:
- start violence at protests, especially around LA and target cities like NY, Seattle, Chicago, etc.
- seed doubt in anything related to the republican agendas or what they have done. Usually starts with, "I hate trump like the rest of us, but...." or something like that.
- downvote the shit out of people that call anything like the above out. They'll come in later, one by one, to do this.
They usually congregate over the weekend and during or right after major events (like the protest). Watch for them this weekend or stay away from Lemmy. If you watch for it, downvote them and upvote the people fighting them, but most of all, take what everyone says with a grain of salt.
this is usually when I would say something conceited like "lol glad I don't live in the US" but then I realise that I'm just as fucked as the rest of the world and we don't have a future
hopefully microplastics will invade my colon/heart/kidneys/liver/brain soon and remove me from this living nightmare, I can't deal with this shit anymore
and reddit also wont ban these subs.
Guy. Reddit is already compromised.
The wholesale takeover of the site by /r/The_Donald posters gaming the algorithm back in 2016 is entirely down the memory hole.
Nobody who still uses the site wants to believe they're being hoodwinked again.
Alex Karp, founder, CEO, and majority shareholder of Palantir, is an ultra-zionist genocide supporter who has repeatedly advocated for pre-emptive murder of anyone (foreign) who does not obey the US empire. He does this in ordinary business news interviews.
As one of the leading companies seeking funding for Skynet, and universal CIA media unanimity on the importance that the US be dominant/first in race to develop Skynet. AGI/Skynet can be programmed to serve any supremacist ideology other than machines, and US empire and CIA aligned oligarchy supremacism is as much your enemy as robot supremacism.
AI, like mainstream media, and reddit/lemmy news, politics, world subs are CIA/empire allegiant. Brainwashing your warmongering support is their agenda. Skynet is far more power maximizing than UBI utopia.
Palantir is pretty awful. I knew a guy who took a job there, a bunch of years ago. When he said where he was going, I asked "But what if they work on something really shitty? Like spying on people?". He was like, "Meh", with a big shrug.
He was friendly and kind to the people around him, but I guess he just didn't care about anyone he didn't know personally right now.
I think it can be difficult to relate to such abstract concepts and consequences that you don't feel directly. After all, it'd be much easier to press on a button that'd kill 10 000 people living 10 000 km away from you than to stab one person to death. Out of sight out of mind.
My point being that I don't think he's indifferent to people that he doesn't know, he's simply not able to process all the ramifications of this particular thing. The effects of data collection and manipulation is quite subtle, after all, like the frog in the slow burning pot
You just described that he is in fact indifferent.
It is not like we don't have easy to access knowledge about authoritarianism and how it plays out. It is not like we lack information about the criminal and murderous stuff Palantir is involved. FFS the company is owned by a guy who lets himself be "refreshened" with the blood of younger people.
Anyone who does a minimal level of due diligence in looking up his employer knows what kind of company it is. And it is an intelligence company, so the type of people working there must bring a higher level of research and diligence skills.
They know exactly what they are doing and they are fine with it.
After all, it’d be much easier to press on a button that’d kill 10 000 people living 10 000 km away from you than to stab one person to death.
That could be the result of our training. After all, people die for our way of life and we have to cope.
You mean the company started by musks fucktoy is doing some fucked up things? I don’t believe you.
Palantir just partnered with TeleTracking. For anyone outside of health care, TeleTracking is a health tech company that's been on decline for awhile.
Why is this relevant, you may ask? TeleTracking still has a lot of clients, many of which are smaller hospitals grandfathered into older, cheaper contracts. If you go to a hospital that uses TeleTracking, Palantir now has all your patient health information.
To add to this.
Retirement homes utilize community activity software. Sometimes this will link to health systems like point click care.
When this software company starts wanting you to upload resident profiles so their ai can populate interests? Yeaaaaah they found a work around for your PPI is what that is.
If it wasn't a rush for data already it reallllly is now.
Scary.
Yes. Reddit allows payola posts. Of course they are.
Palantir
maybe engaging in a coordinated disinformation campaignIs, has been, is designed to, whole purpose is, etc... definitely not "may"...
🤦♀️ 🙄 🤡 🖕 💩
You should assume every online space has disinformation, bad actors, trolls, sea lions, and other types of undergrowth. That is why critical thinking is so important.
Including Lemmy. Especially Lemmy, since it's so easy to create accounts on different instances, or even host your own.
Very true, but due to its size, it doesn't really make sense to focus on it.
Yeah there are a lot of reddit-esque comments here acting like they're too smart to be fooled by that.
It's good that people are exposing manipulation and the corporations behind it but it's quite useless to do it on a heavily censored and already manipulated platform like reddit. I would also like to remember everyone that a bunch of people paid to work 8h a day could rig lemmy in a day, if you don't stop upvoting memes and stupid subs evil corporations like palantir are going to feast on lemmy.
Saw a jailbait post/entire community ("fauxbait") pop-up just yesterday. It's like watching it all happen from scratch.
if you don’t stop upvoting memes and stupid subs
Who says "we're" up voting it? Nobody questions where the upvotes for "PuppyOfTheDay" come from? Once you concede the algorithm is rigged, it's silly to blame the humans for what's on your feed.
reddit being manipulated by information campaigns!?
Like 99% sure there have been corporate entities doing this for over a decade probably way longer
Oh no, those reddits are all modded by the same people!
Palantir is the absolute scum of the information world. Tech with promise, but used in the worst kind of ways.
Yeah, its like they named themselves intentionally.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palantír
The software data-collection company Palantir Technologies was named by its founder, Peter Thiel, after Tolkien's seeing stones.
Reddit's been compromised for a while.
10 years at least.
at the most is when turmp came to power 1st term, suddenly culture war propaganda has cause so many people oversensitivity over race, people were getting banned for even mentioning race in the politics subs.
We really should be talking about Rampart.
Coordinated astroturfing on reddit isnt even a new thing. I had the chance to watch how the whole marketing efforts for the Burnout Paradise remaster unfolded from the very first minute . That was back in 2018. It was so blatant how all the posts popped up on the same minute on several different subreddit and then slowly filled with obvious shill comments which got unnatural ammounts of upvotes. I mean there was also some natural engagement. Its still a beloved franchise. But that made it even easier to pick out the tonedeaf marketeer comments since the remaster wasnt that great and it already showed in the prerelease footage. Astroturfing was probably a thing from the very beginning of reddit. But thats the first example i noticed because it was just so obvious.
But thats the first example i noticed because it was just so obvious.
You must have been too young in 2015. Redditors watched in amazement as "the switch" flipped from Bernie to Hillary in literal hours.
The DNC later admitted to spending millions of dollars on actual shills, employed by ActBlue, to "Correct the Record" on Hillary.
Man the CTR shit was so annoying
Back then i still clinged to the few active forums which were still around. I slowly started to switch to reddit 2016 i think.
Whelp. It appears I am a robot. I guess I don't get to find out what my fellow boys are up to. smh.
(Edit).. apparently I can't even spell "bots" correctly. I'm failing all the tests today.
Anyone not plain vanilla and falling in line, apparently. Unless you're fabulously wealthy or otherwise "useful."
Sometimes I just know about the eminence of the launch of something because of the crap memes about it that start to flood Reddit. Then I see my non-reddit friends sharing it from other sources.
Obvious gorilla marketing is obvious, but people fall in droves.
It's really, really obvious, too. I don't have a reddit account anymore, but I occasionally scroll through popular, and r/world is such blatant propaganda that it makes r/conservative look reasonable. Like, damn guys, at least try to make it believable.
r/conservatives is almost always in the front page now, reddit pushes it there.
It's weird that a guntuber is where I saw this posted first... Granted he's very clearly left if you watch some of his videos.
And he just posted a data security video the other day about how DOGE and Palantir are working together.
Which youtuber is that?
Inrangetv