It likely doesn't take too much for any group of coordinated individuals to significantly sway any social media. I mean, even on lemmy -- if you had like 5 people who scoured 'new', or who had a program to scour 'new' posts for specific keywords, and just downvoted/upvoted specific content, it'd have an impact. Enough downvotes will hide posts from most other users, enough upvotes will amplify the message.

Similarly, if you look at who posts to lemmy, there are some folks with like 10's of thousands of posts in a year, and those posts often follow specific ideological agendas. I once asked one of these sorts of accounts what their situation was, wondering if they were like a paid employee of a PR firm or something given that they had over 50 posts per day, and the response was "You have no proof". I mean, a simple "Nah, I'm just passionate about certain topics" would've sufficed, but instead they chose to deflect the question and claim innocence via a lack of definitive proof. If I had 'proof' I wouldn't have been politely asking/curious as to their response.

Social media is basically designed to be manipulated by propagandists. Doesn't really matter what corporate structure is behind it, whether its federated or not.

Such a hassle when Xitter is right there and lets them spread propaganda without any hacking.

They are also here in the fediverse

Hijacked how, though?

Shouldn't 2FA be enough to prevent such things?

Hopefully, it's fully decentralised 😂