Given the state of technology, politics, and social media, we all share fears about interacting with bots, or having our social media manipulated. We know that this is happening on other platforms that are driven by engagement/profit models. However, Lemmy is about people – like you! While this platform is not immune to bots, we have several layers of protections in place to remove bots and trolls as quickly as possible.
Some of these operations are performed automatically at a server level, and you likely never see them at all. Some rely on the reporting system and the common sense of our userbase – that’s you again! If you believe that another user is a bot, please report it and our mod team will investigate. Please keep in mind that real people really do have radically different points of view. Not everyone who disagrees with you is a bot or troll. Do not abuse the report system.
We encourage the expression and discussion of different points of view, as long as the discussion is civil and in good faith. It is not a civil form of disagreement to call another user a bot or paid actor in posts or comments. It is a personal attack, which is a violation of our first rule. We have updated the language of the rule in our sidebar to reflect this. Our first priority is for the safety of our users to express their ideas. Thanks!
- Be civil
Attack the argument, not the person. No racism/sexism/bigotry. Good faith argumentation only. This includes accusing another user of being a bot or paid actor. Trolling is uncivil and is grounds for removal and/or a community ban.
What about users who clearly aren’t literal bots, but seem clearly to be posting in bad faith? I feel like there’s going to be a huge grey area between “this needs mod intervention” and “there’s nothing hinky about this user’s posting”
I completely get the reason for the rule, as it’s not a real productive accusation and there’s no way to know. I’m one of the people that talk about the shills a lot, but I actually make a deliberate effort (probably without universal success) to draw a distinction between “there are shills here” versus “I think you are being dishonest in some way, and here is why” versus “you are a shill”.
Banning the third sounds pretty sensible. Are the first two statements still allowed? Or are those considered uncivil also?
It is blatantly obvious to me that particular users on Lemmy are being some kind of dishonest about their motives. So like an example: Swearing that you want the Democrats to win the election, and you’re bringing up bad things about Biden as constructive criticism / so he can fix it and thus not lose the election, but also publishing objectively false disinformation about the Democrats on a very regular, like absurdly regular basis. There are a lot of users who have that weird type of disconnect or other reasons to specifically think they are propaganda accounts of some description. I think it significantly distorts the discussion here in a way which is very much not a good thing.
I actually don’t see it being super common that people jump to the accusation of someone being a shill as soon as there’s a disagreement. I do think there’s such a clear presence of some kind of shilling effort that it’s, more or less, universally accepted that it’s happening and distorting the discourse. Are we still allowed to talk about it?
Again, while I completely get the reasons for the rule… I feel like a lot of this stuff is hard for mods to be the ones to make mod-action decisions about because it’s impossible for anyone with any level of powers to know which users are being honest about who they are. Upvote bots and things are one thing, but I actually don’t see that happening all that much (maybe because the mods are on it any time it happens). Just someone making a real account and posting propaganda 10x per day, though… are we saying the mods are going to let that happen (because it’s not a bot account) and we the normal users are not allowed to call out those users as doing anything, if in our opinion they’re doing it for purposes of propaganda?
You are the reason this rule is necessary.
Pretty sure that’s a Rule 1 ban for you there.
Eh
I didn’t take it as a personal attack to point out that I frequently get in fights with the propaganda accounts. I took some issues with his statement but purely on the factual merits; I didn’t receive it as an attack if that makes a difference.