this post was submitted on 05 Apr 2025
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Fediverse vs Disinformation

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Pointing out, debunking, and spreading awareness about state- and company-sponsored astroturfing on Lemmy and elsewhere. This includes social media manipulation, propaganda, and disinformation campaigns, among others.

Propaganda and disinformation are a big problem on the internet, and the Fediverse is no exception.

What's the difference between misinformation and disinformation? The inadvertent spread of false information is misinformation. Disinformation is the intentional spread of falsehoods.

By equipping yourself with knowledge of current disinformation campaigns by state actors, corporations and their cheerleaders, you will be better able to identify, report and (hopefully) remove content matching known disinformation campaigns.


Community rules

Same as instance rules, plus:

  1. No disinformation
  2. Posts must be relevant to the topic of astroturfing, propaganda and/or disinformation

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The acts of collective resistance documented by the CCC—as well as by other activism-tracking initiatives, such the “We the People Dissent” Substack—span every state. They focus on advocacy for diverse constituencies and issues under attack from the current administration, including public education, Medicaid and reproductive, immigrant, Palestinian, labor and LGBTQ rights.

Their common thread is opposition to Trump’s fascistic ideology and rapid rash of likely unconstitutional executive orders, such as freezing federal budget outlays approved by Congress, the mass firing of government workers and the dismantling of institutions by the “Department” of Government Efficiency by unelected “adviser” Elon Musk.

But if you relied on articles and broadcasts from the legacy national news media during early 2025, you wouldn’t know the extent of grassroots action prompted by this discontent. A FAIR examination of five major outlets found that coverage of anti-Trump/pro-democracy protests roughly overlapping CCC’s study timeframe (January 22 to February 26) was minimal, and downplayed the significance of this opposition, especially around the inauguration.

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[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 day ago (7 children)

Hope this is true and not just cope. As the article notes, though there are more marches, the marches are smaller. What that shakes out to in terms of absolute numbers of participants is unclear.

Currently, considering polling numbers, I'm disinclined to believe that public discontent is all that high compared to Trump's first administration, but I hope I'm wrong, and I'm glad that there are orgs paying attention and recording data so we can get a clearer picture.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 day ago (6 children)

This is a start, crawling before walking and all that.

I am not at all sure nationally there will ever be more than a small minority of people. Need 1% of active participants from the population and the 'game' changes to the next phase. This is a multiple years effort

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

Oh yeah, I don't mean to say that these protests aren't vital, regardless of whether they're bigger or smaller than 2017.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 day ago

They are vital, and not the end product.

Also, this is a nation that is challenged for grassroots and protests.

Some alchemy needs to happen to get different sorts of people involved. Right now, the people doing this are those who still mostly believe that the system can work. I would be surprised if it were more than a handful of real socialists, anarchists, communists and other representatives of the left.

The next important milestone here will be to get people doing stuff who are pretty much convinced the system cannot be changed via normal American protests. And, I am hopeful, but not sure this can happen. Some major stuff has to happen between now and then. And I am not sure of what can or will happen. We have not seen that group out and about since the 1970s

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