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I feel like warning people about bad actors is a public service that should be encouraged. If you saw the user's interactions with me you might agree with my theory too. But since you can't even say what I did, Lemmy literally can and will be used as a tool for election interference, with no recourse at all
If you feel someone is a bad actor, report them and let the mods deal with it.
That sounds nice and all, but what evidence can I provide? Are you really going to read 10+ comments and make a judgment call? There are at least 2 people I've seen just lie and lie to their heart's content and today my messages calling them out resulted in mod actions against me.
Just saying "you are lying and I think it's because you're being paid to" is enough to get me banned/deleted all over the place. Kinda sucks that in this way it's like Facebook here (calling out people being shitty gets punished at times). To be clear, I think Lemmy is far better than a network like FB but at the same time I really wish we could ditch all the bad parts of places like that.
If someone reports as "Seems like this is a bad actor", yeah, that's exactly what we do. We also have two back channel chats, one with the other mods and the lemmy.world admins and another with admins of multiple lemmy instances.
If we determine that what they are doing may not necessarily violate the rules, it elevates their user name to a point where we are all now watching them.
I will typically reply and engage with them to see how bad they really are, sometimes that's enough for them to peel back the mask and get then banned.
Okay. Just curious, would it qualify as suspicious if a user repeatedly says others "support genocide" without them ever once uttering such a thing? The two users I'm talking about will throw that out every single time someone disagrees with their views about Israel. That kind of wackadoo shit, along with lying to make trump look better, and other dishonest claims unrelated to anything else.
Oh, I know EXACTLY who you're talking about. :)
That doesn't make them bots or bad actors. They're allowed to have bad opinions.
Where we draw the line is attacking other users. If they're saying YOU'RE supporting genocide, that's a civility rule and the comment will get pulled.
If they say Biden or Harris or anyone else is supporting genocide, that's clearly not true and a bad opinion but allowed.
I'm honestly curious though, what would it take for a user to be considered a Russian (or other) troll? Would they need to directly praise trump many times every day? I see some people lying about things Biden has done quite a lot... Would there ever be a threshold where it's considered obvious that they're only here to spread misinformation?
The big one was when Return2Ozma admitted, in public, that they were only interested in posting negative Biden information, that got them a 30 day ban.
Barring something like that? It's subjective. Mods don't have access to IP information so we can't directly see if something is, say, coming from a bot farm.
The Admins can see that, but with VPNs and such, IP information isn't 100% reliable either.
Ugh yeah I know making and enforcing the rules can't be easy exactly but it's disappointing that a direct admission to extreme bias is only a temporary ban.
I have noticed that user you mentioned is pretty bad too, but my pet peeve user is Linkerbaan. they post and comment all the time that not only is Biden directly to blame for everything Israel does, if you question them at all, then you support, defend, or even "love" genocide.
So following up, since the admins are currently talking about a vote manipulation case thats kind of fascinating...
Someone was a victim of a mass downvote attack and that got on the admins radar.
Pulling the database data, they found 20 some odd accounts that appear to upvote one particular user, and, at least in this case, downvoted another.
All the accounts were random combinations of letters and numbers. They have no content other than the up and down votes.
Several of them have sign up email addresses with the same domain as the upvoted user. There are also some shared IP addresses as well.
I expect there will be a mass ban event here shortly if it's not already happening.
Very interesting. I appreciate the info!
I mean, I've been accused of "supporting genocide" 100 times and I'm not aware of a single one of those comments being removed. And I literally have never said a single thing to justify that claim. "Biden can't control Netanyahu" for example. I know a user who would zero hesitation respond to the that with "you support genocide" and has many times to anything related to Israel that they dislike. Yeah I get opinions shouldn't be policed but flat out just lying ideally would be.
The big thing is what gets reported and what doesn't. Contrary to public opinion, mods aren't out here reading every comment in every thread.
We DO read and review everything that gets reported, and when a comment is reported, it also goes to the admins, both here and on the users home instance.