I think we all know by now that major social media platforms in the West are the target of multiple astroturfing and psyop campaigns by both private and state actors.
This post, while obvious in implication, is important as it is the first time I have seen this fact discussed on a major site without receiving a large volume of accusations of conspiratorial thought in recent memory. I think there is also an important meta-discussion to be had regarding our role in combating such campaigns as fediverse denizens.
Obviously, we don’t have the manpower to oppose things like this directly. There is additionally the unfortunate reality that we are not as immune here as we might like to think. I personally believe the fediverse likely is subject to similar astroturfing and that to believe otherwise is naive. However, even if there is no major targeting of sites like Lemmy, we are still subject to a trickledown effect from the major social media sites. Popular opinion will be swayed here indirectly by these campaigns regardless of if we are targeted specifically or not.
How can we protect our communities and more importantly our societies?
They were largely political. Anything "criminal” discussed in the beginning was how to give regular people more access to information, and real solutions to RL problems. As those channels grew, ideas were necessarily diversified, some more radical, some pretty vanilla.
Power criminalizes anything that may lead to a concession of that power. Something something asked nicely, etc. AND the larger those channels grew, so too did more bad actors with ill intent from the jump, whether LE, political disruptors, or outright chaos goblins.
In short nothing is risk free, but LE is more of a threat than any other bad actors, because protests will be criminalized, mutual aid will be criminalized, reporting will be criminalized, recording, anything. And it already is, defacto if not in writ. But it serves no one to demonize everyone.