this post was submitted on 24 Nov 2024
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Basically none on the part of the handlers. Often this arrangement is handled by a private firm that doesn't necessarily have to be Russian or Chinese, I have heard of one operating in Australia. The posters themselves are spending a lot of time, but they're the ones selling it.
Again, they're not exactly paying these guys a living wage, and even if they were, it's peanut crumbs for state-level actors.
A lot of people say that Lemmy is not worth the effort to demoralize because it's too small, I say the effort is too small to not be worth the investment. I would even say that Lemmy users are self-selected for radicalization in some ways, broadly speaking they are fed up with corporate social media and corporatism in general.
It's also a somewhat important step to have a place they can speak unfiltered amongst themselves, no matter how small the clubhouse is. That's where the real funky shit happens.
I doubt those people are even aware of Lemmy, let alone hiring teams of people to post here. But regardless of how plausible it is, this is just speculation with no evidence behind it.
That which is asserted without evidence can be dismissed without evidence.
commercial and propaganda bots have a tendency of taking small fora, and other sites with the ability to post, offline, as they overwhelm these super tiny venues, once their automated scrapers find them. There doesn't have to be a team of people doing something other than monitoring bots.
Also, I doubt anyone gets exposed to lemmy alone. It is very reasonable to believe many spend time on places worth using actual people to tailor their messaging to, and then carry that over here, and anywhere else they go. Point being, there no place so small that it becomes void of this.
Most of the users people are complaining about are very obviously not bots though. After investigating and interacting with them, I’ve universally found that they’re just weird, terminally online people with extreme views.
Actually, an offline friend of mine was recently accused of being an online shill. I’ve been pretty skeptical of these claims for a while but having a case with definitive proof has lost me all patience for these types of accusations. There’s just no point in accusing people like this unless you have actual proof. Most people are very very bad at distinguishing real users from propaganda.
Oh, I am not trying to say these particular people are bots, I am just pointing out that lemmy is not free of bots due to its size, also that there people are not solely on lemmy, so they are likely getting propaganda , in bot farm form, elsewhere, be it the US, Russia, China, EU, Exxon, whatever.