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!
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, obviously Reddit is full of astroturfing and psyops, remember when all of sudden everyone on that bloody website was a die-hard zionist when the week before most americans could not have placed Israel on a map
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.
Just waiting for Thiel to buy Reddit.
Thiel funded reddit. He’s had his hands in it since 2014.
Damn, I forgot about that somehow. I hate this timeline.
He probably already bought it through private equity.
spez might sell it to musk instead.
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.
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
I left reddit years ago, what are these policy changes that you’re talking about and how do they relate to spreading “disinformation”?
My take: removing API access and banning mods who protested saying that this would centralize tooling (removing 3p access), plus banning users who mentioned Musk or Luigi as “violent” are clear indicators that they are disinformation sympathetic, despite the primarily “left wing” seeming content that remains. Also a lot of promoted content is disinformation, as can be seen in minutes of browsing.
plus banning users who mentioned Musk or Luigi as “violent”
Correct me if I’m wrong, but wasn’t the new rule to remove and/or ban any comment or person who calls for violence against specific people? I wouldn’t really say that’s “disinformation sympathetic”. Even if it’s what you originally said, how does that have anything to do with “providing a platform for the spread of disinformation”?
Also a lot of promoted content is disinformation
Promoted content as in ads?
Officially yes. I got banned for saying “Musk fuming is violently toxic”, site wide and permanently from 6 subreddits. Others got banned just saying “Luigi is innocent”. Try it out. That reads more like quashing free speech to me.
Disinformation in the ads, yes. Also front page stuff making past moderation. Today in r/science I saw “Democrats are less tolerant of Republicans than vice versa” and a load of unscientific hogwash saying Republicans are not as intolerant as Democrats think. Go find it yourself if you don’t believe me.
That seems like a platform of disinformation to me.
I’m sorry but I don’t believe you were banned site wide for saying that, and no one has been banned for saying “Luigi is innocent”. Not a chance. Can you please share the ban message and link to the comment?
As for tolerance, well I’m sorry but I think it’s pretty clear that that is right lol. Coincidentally I saw this last night on Twitter:
As we saw with Simone Biles recently, who was attacked by her fellow democrats because she wasn’t pro-trans enough in her vile attack on Riley Gains, the “tolerant left” are anything but. They even like to proudly cite the “paradox of tolerance” at every opportunity.
How can I share a comment that has been removed? The original is not accessible to me.
Here’s all I have (happened in justguysbeingdudes, and 4 others):
Hello, You have been permanently banned from participating in r/harrypotter because your comment violates this community’s rules. You won’t be able to post or comment, but you can still view and subscribe to it.
Note from the moderators:
Deliberate repost of content removed by by Reddit. "[This comment was edited in protest to Reddit banning me for the following “violent” comment: “Elon musk fuming is fatally toxic.]”
If you have a question regarding your ban, you can contact the moderator team by replying to this message.
Reminder from the Reddit Admin team: If you use another account to circumvent this community ban, that will be considered a violation of the Reddit Rules and may result in your account being banned from the platform as a whole.
But no point in further engaging with a bad faith troll. I bet you believe Trump won the 2024 election with no tampering or unfair purging. I don’t think evidence works on your kind of person. Therefore you are unlikely to convince me of anything.
How can I share a comment that has been removed? The original is not accessible to me.
The ban message usually has the offending comment in it.
The one you just posted clearly states why you were banned from r/harrypotter - you admitted to deliberately reposting content that was removed already. Even if that wasn’t the content that was removed, you told them that you were doing it.
Also if you were banned site-wide then you wouldn’t have been able to edit that comment in order to get banned from the harry potter sub. So did you actually get banned from reddit, or just from a few subs? Individual mods banning you is different to admins banning you. Your story doesn’t add up.
I hate that you’re making me even remotely defend reddit lol. Reddit is a far left agenda pushing shithole. You will not be banned from the entire site for saying “Elon musk fuming is fatally toxic”. You just won’t. Were you actually perma-banned from the entirety of Reddit, not just r/harrypotter?
But no point in further engaging with a bad faith troll.
I bet you believe Trump won the 2024 election with no tampering or unfair purging.
Oh so you think the election was “stolen” do you? I thought that didn’t and couldn’t happen?
Vibes. Got it.
I mean, usually people don’t say “I am disinforming you, hah!”. We can only rely on that weird feeling that something isn’t right. That’s what makes it so pernicious compared to plain good faith misinformation.
I’m not sure what you interpret from the words “policy changes” but they dont usually refer to a weird feeling.
Funny that’s exactly the zeitgeist of 1930s Germany.
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.
He also considers himself a marxist iirc
link to that? I looked for one.
What the other guy provided is as good as I will find
https://www.businessinsider.com/palantirs-ceo-alex-karp-is-a-self-described-socialist-2018-11
He referred to himself as “socialist” in 2018, apparently.
Of the National variety.
I mean, that’s right on the mark. The reason they called themselves National Socialists isn’t because they were socialists, but because they knew that their true beliefs were so abhorrent that they needed to lie about being socialists.
Elon Musk has been recently shown to have done the same thing.
He’s confused with national-socialist.
Probably double speak. in 2024 election cycle he tried to say he wasn’t picking sides but in same sentence “but democrats cultural marxist wokeness must stop”. Zionist oligarchs turn on liberal values is that being anti genocide is woke.
His actions show he is absolutely not.
BS
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.
the company is owned by a guy who lets himself be “refreshened” with the blood of younger people.
Aside from the moral aspect, did his AI tell him that would work?
He was a pretty smart guy, so I’m pretty sure he understood the ramifications. This isn’t like a plumber working in a building that happens to house an evil company. This was directly working as a high ranking software developer at a shitty software company.
Sure he does, intellectually, just like I understand the ramifications of buying a smartphone, clothes “made in Bangladesh”, or using a public AI model. Still the human conscience doesn’t apply too much significance to something that abstract. It doesn’t keep me up at night that my lithium is mined by Congolese children - but if I had to buy it personally from a one-armed indentured labourer I’m sure I’d stop immediately. “Out of sight out of mind” isn’t an excuse for committing heinous acts, I’m just saying that it’s not simply that he “doesn’t care about other people”
Right, humans are bad about that kind of thing. I think it has to do with Dunbar’s number? The monkeysphere? It’s hard for us to model a lot of people as full people in our head, especially as they’re more removed from us.
Like you probably don’t really think about the garbage man as a fully fleshed out guy with hopes, dreams, a favorite band, a love that got away, and all that. When you have some absolutely rancid trash, you probably just throw it in the can and forget about it. But if it was your mother or best friend that was going to have to deal with it, maybe you’d be more careful. Wouldn’t want the bag to rip and spray maggots all over Mom.
That’s fine. That’s all of us.
But I think there’s degrees. Shades. Like you mentioned cell phones. Most of us accept the out of sight horrors that go with them. But, like, some people are absolute assholes to wait staff. Just treat the waiter like shit, are rude to the coffee shop people, whatever. I think most of us recognize that as bad.
Somewhere between those two points I think is “I’m going to build software to spy on people”. Personally, I think that should be ok the far side of the line. The not okay side. Why? A bit of self preservation, a bit of ethics, and a helping of “I don’t want to contribute to bad things happening to people, even ones I don’t know”.
This post is getting long. I think you’re right that it’s not as simple as “doesn’t care about other people” but I think that’s a factor.
Absolutely a nuanced area. But on top of not modelling random people as full individuals it’s hard to determine what spying on people might actually mean. I don’t really want to defend working for a company as nefarious as Palantir - even if I honestly hardly knew them before Trump #2 - but convincing yourself that gathering people’s data isn’t problematic is quite easy, and we all inherently accept a wide array of surveillance measures as - willing or unwilling - members of state entities, be it a video camera in a clothing store or governments logging our tax data. Then comes the fact that employees below the level of “board of directors” usually don’t know everything going on in the company; I wouldn’t fault a junior dev choosing to work for, say, ‘cool’ Google or Apple in 2017.
Of course it’s relevant that humans are egocentrical animals; I wouldn’t give my own life to save five people that I don’t know in Moldova. Being too empathetic is a poor trait in a dog eat dog world. Of course we need standards and to hold others up to these standards; I don’t know your friend, what he does at Palantir or when he started working there - maybe he’s a lazy ass that holds them back haha - and I do think, especially with all that’s transpired the past 5 months, that it’s a problematic company to be part of - I just wanted to discuss that I don’t think it’s just lack of empathy
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.
I’ve heard that’s how a lot of wealthy people feel. They want the absolute best for people in their family, and that’s about it.
Yup. I’ve worked in tech for nearly 20 years. Most people who work in tech don’t give a shit about the ethics of what they do or where they work if the money is good.
This is a screenshot from one of the discords of current and/or previous coworkers, but the sentiment is everywhere
Sleepwalking into nazi germany with that attitude.
Unfortunately many of the people I work or have worked with are from all over the world, and many of them share these ideals. I took a big pay cut 5 years ago to move from the ad/ecommerce industry to work at an emergency management SaaS company.
The app I now work on is used to save lives, whereas the customers I was producing work for at my last job would do anything for the extra dollar. Knowing where my time is going towards the general good is very rewarding. Yet many people I spoke to in my industry were confused at my decision.
Late stage capitalism and fascism I think eventually are inseparable. Just the centralization of power and wealth consolidation that fails everyone involved in the system except those at the top
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.
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.
According to your history you are posting memes and shitposts yourself.
I guess I’m a highly sophosticated Palantir bot account trying to trick you into interacting with me.
Like 99% sure there have been corporate entities doing this for over a decade probably way longer
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.
Anything Peter Thiel is involved in you know it is going to be fucking evil on some level.
apparently he is known to have his own island of f—boys. and his boy toy bf last year got mysteriously defenestrated in florida(they alleged suicide, but it seems highly suspicious especially the bf was complainig about the anti-lgbtq+ stance of thiel)
From what I can tell he idolizes Saruman.
A powerful henchmen of the evil lord with secret designs on overthrowing him to become the new big bad guy power. That tracks.
he also named his other companies, various LOTR themes too. anduril, lembas,etc.
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.”
