What you do is not critical thinking at all. I don’t think you’ve ever read up on that. What you do is not in any way better than Trump and his minions do. It’s just polemics with no substance whatsoever.

I am quite aware of that from the US news. Nevertheless, please be aware that there are people who take social media at face value. So please don’t make any recommendations that go against common sense.

I’m not from the US, but that sounds like bad advice.

Presumably for the same reason that obviously corrupt constitutional judges cannot be removed from office or even be prosecuted: It’s in the US system. It’s a system that has more of a plutocracy than a democracy for the people - it’s been that way for a long time; especially since Reagan undid many of Truman’s “new deal” reforms.

Lots of people might also think that it’s perfectly normal in a democracy that you can buy your personal congressman, a supreme court judge or even a presidential candidate. This has a long tradition especially in the US and is probably kinda normalized by now for some strange reason. I think it can’t be wrong to emphasize that this is neither normal nor desirable in a functioning democracy.

This is presumably not a bad thing, as Google would most likely have benefited the most from this, especially as the so-called “privacy sandbox” that Google had planned as a replacement or server-side tracking are even more difficult to avoid. The “privacy sandbox” in particular would have been more of a competitive advantage for Google because, as the provider of Chrome, they are the only ones who have comprehensive access to aggregated user data that is collected directly via the browser.

Removed by mod

Ok, noted. Will try to do better. Just one more followup question: Why do you think my presumptions are unfounded? I mean besides that you seem to have faith in the good of all people and don’t seem to think that there is such a thing as computational propaganda.

Well, I guess we have to agree that we disagree then.

Is your argument that it’s okay to spread hate and slander without providing any evidence as long as people aren’t getting paid? Also, what makes you so sure that these are private accounts?

I’m sorry you’ve had a bad experience. Nevertheless, I think that a certain basic skepticism is important in social media, because it is simply a fact that many interest groups on the internet are fighting for sovereignty of interpretation and use enormous resources to assert themselves - even with very questionable methods. This of course makes it difficult to build trust and have an open discourse. The advantage of Lemmy, however, is that at least the platform itself does not interfere too much, like Meta, X or TikTok do. Therefore, it seems to me that there is a much higher probability that you will be heard with your opinion, message or whatever, if you can provide good arguments for your point of view. Sure, there are some viewpoints that users reject despite good arguments, but from my Lemmy experience so far, that seems to me to be the exception rather than the rule.

It is certainly true that other interest groups also engage in propaganda (or PR, as it is called these days) in both traditional and social media. But that’s not what this thread is about.

Anyway, you can perhaps even see something positive in the fact that the usual PR and opinion manipulation methods are now apparently also being applied to Lemmy, because this shows that whoever is responsible for these campaigns obviously ascribes a certain importance to this platform and thus also to the Fediverse - and that is somewhat of a good thing, I guess.

Exactly. I mean accounts that are typically not very old and exclusively spread right-wing content and the corresponding ideas - apart from perhaps a few low effort comments or posts that are most likely intended to conceal this fact. What makes these accounts even more suspicious to me is that they generally do not put forward any factual arguments, are not impressed by them in any way and are not even interested in a discussion. If you confront them and they respond at all, they always lapse into whataboutism or fall back on the familiar “I’m just asking questions” - both are strategies that think tanks in particular use to deflect attention from the fact that their claims and accusations have no factual basis. I can only conclude from such behavior that it is not about exchanging ideas with others, but about promoting a clearly defined world view, creating discord and aggression, tying up resources or forming a nucleus for belief in irrational assertions. I don’t think private individuals without a political agenda would do that - at least not to this extent.

What makes you think they are?

They even try to do this on Lemmy. I’ve seen a few accounts recently that were obviously created with the sole purpose of spreading right-wing propaganda.

Müller (Unternehmensgruppe Theo Müller), an unscrupulous European food company with ties to the radical right. There are plenty of alternatives, including regional ones.

Müller owns numerous prominent brands, especially in Germany and the UK, but also in other countries.

Broom? Rake?

I am quite annoying tho

And still all he came up with was the same ol’ shoe scam all over again.

Damn, you are indeed not joking. I had to double-check because it’s so ridiculous.