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[META] A few words about Bots and Civility

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!

  1. 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.

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  • 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.

    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?

    • I banned some of the most obvious and prolific shills from my instance and there was a small but noticeable drop in server CPU load. Their posts are not the cause, it's all the comments on their posts and the votes on all of that. Those are being discarded instead of processed.

      Their effect should not be underestimated.

      • Is this Beehaw?

        I remember seeing the defederation from Lemmy.world announcement, saying (as I remember it) that as much as they weren’t happy about taking that step, the flood of unwanted garbage was getting too overwhelming for any other realistic approach. I thought to myself, whoa that’s weird. Then I hung out on Lemmy.world for a while and said oooh this is what they were talking about, this is fuckin unpleasant.

        Dude the tankies when I first joined Lemmy I thought were awesome; I went in and argued with them about the Ukraine war. I actually learned a bunch of stuff although not exactly what they were attempting to teach me. This relentless tide of single comments always on the same handful of talking points is something entirely different.

        • As if they have a script, I don't get it. You have to agree to a lot of historical revisionism to shill it tho.

          • It was so weird. But enjoyable to me.

            Actually, I remembered that I think I accused one of them, or many of them, of being bots, so maybe that sort of undoes my "no no I would never do that to someone just because they disagreed with me" thesis 🙂

            The thing is, something really weird happened that made me think it. I said something along the lines of "hey this source is actually really good, I don't agree with the conclusions you're drawing 100%, but thank you for sending it to me I learned a lot" and got back a response like "how can you ever expect to learn anything if you're just dismissing sources out of hand etc etc, you need to open your mind and be open to opposing points of view, you're just being ignorant"... I don't remember it exactly, but it was a response that when I looked at it, I realized would be a sort of boilerplate comment that would serve as a generic hostile response to almost anything. And, by sheer stupid dumb luck, it happened that it was total non matching nonsense to this total unusual backwards degree as applied to what I had actually said, which was a sort of unusually friendly and open-to-discussion response.

            It was like the "They Live" glasses came on, and I started looking at every response in the thread like that. Like what the fuck is this? Was that guy just not reading what I wrote and in some sort of hategasm where he was just typing anything... or am I in a bot lobby right now? What the fuck is going on?

            IDK, I never really figured it out. But it was definitely very weird. Definitely some of the people in there were real human tankies and like I say I learned a decent amount by talking with them (for way too fucking long, IDK why). But it was, now that I think about it, my very first encounter on Lemmy with some user that made me wonder what the fuck was even going on on the other side of the keyboard because it made literally 0 sense at all, what had just happened.

    • Most of what you describe would be a case by case basis. This post applies specifically to calling another user a bot or a shill. Pointing out intellectual dishonesty or hypocrisy can be a part of normal discourse and can be done in a way that respects the civility of the conversation. Some of what you describe could be in violation of other community rules, depending on the details.

      The best thing to do if you're unsure about a particular situation is to report it, and mods will review it. You can always message one of us about a situation if you are not sure or require additional clarification. People are allowed to disagree with one another, even vehemently, as long as they do so within the rules of the community.

      • Hm

        Last question I guess; do you feel that misinformation or propaganda is any kind of issue on Lemmy right now? Like if you look at the posts and comments, does the overall conversation “look right” to you in that regard?

        • If you are speaking of Lemmy as a whole, that is a pretty philosophical question.

          Misinformation is a violation of the rules of this community and will be removed.

          • I was specifically thinking of /c/politics and /c/news on Lemmy.world; probably should have been explicit about that. Philosophy aside and just in your personal opinion / judgement, would you say the overall discourse in those communities right now looks to have any nontrivial amount of misinformation in it?

    • You are the reason this rule is necessary.

      • Caution, I’m gonna take this way too seriously and write a big super-serious response:

        I would be curious how far you have to go back in my history to find an example of me actually calling someone a bot or paid actor. I would bet that you get sick of the process before finding one. You will probably find me calling someone out on dishonesty or accuse them of being a propaganda account of some description, but even that I think you’d have to go back a couple weeks at least.

        I’m actually very careful in what I say about this issue as regards any specific user I’m talking to, for exactly the reasons laid out in the post - because it’s not productive to the conversation to get in a personal pissing match with any specific user or accuse them of things that there’s no way to prove or disprove anyway. I am human and get irritated and post inflammatory or personal attacks that I should not - and in particular I am extremely irritated that this platform seems overrun with propaganda which is distorting the conversation - but at least 90% of the time, I engage with the bad faith accounts purely on the merits of their arguments (which seems like a more productive way anyway). And, the other 10%, unless I’m really in a bad mood about something I will make some level of effort to measure my words about it a little.

        Like I say I won’t claim to get it perfectly right. And I like the narrowly-applied version of the rule which is described in the post. I am just very curious about the exact location of any applications of it that might go outside of that narrow wording, though, hence my questions and me giving some context for them. Because yes, I am curious how much of what I say might be a problem that the application of this rule might become the necessary solution to.

        • Fair enough, you might not have specifically said "bot" or "Russian", but this idea that there are pervasive influence campaigns everywhere and that people who comment against you aren't being honest is the core of the problem. Unless you're really pulling in some nonstandard tooling and doing some additional analysis on posting times and finding template wording (not just people using things epithets like "Blue MAGA"), you really don't have any ability to sniff out fake posting from just people you really disagree with.

          Someone coming on Lemmy day after day to diss the Democratic party may very well just not like the Democratic party. I have some people I follow on Mastodon that have radicalized over time. They were real and slightly cynical posters who just got more and more angry at the way everything's turned out. And on the other hand, I also have people I follow who spend half their time just repeating Democratic party influencers. That's not fake, that's just a particularly clunky form of memeing. And still others who very deliberately want to spread their political view by whatever means are optimal. That's maybe manipulative, but that's also just another method for political persuasion.

          This whole core of this post reads like "I like this, BUT there are totally fake posters and we need to call them out". This strain of dialogue isn't unique to Lemmy, it's basically everywhere in public discourse and as I said elsewhere, poison to it. Because you're not going to prove it. In all likelihood you're probably wrong, as most influence operations were simply enhancing existing positions and thus largely indistinguishable from them. You're just going to get people who also dislike the target saying "hur hur, they sure are fake" and the other side saying the accusations are insane, and then devolve into increasingly acrimonious back and forth taking up half the comments on a post.

          • https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-43301643

            I mean those people exist and they are an issue. The mods want us to report suspicious activity, and that's about the best we can do. I personally look for Nazi activity and dog whistles and compared to Reddit, Lemmy is a paradise. I had one kinda questionable commenter who seems to deliberately be confusing leftwing and rightwing (which can be a Nazi thing dating back to calling themselves National Socialists to confuse people about who is left and who is rightwing). But even that person could genuinely be misunderstanding possibly, it is hard ti tell and in general accusing people of being a shill doesn't move the conversation forward in a meaningful way 90% of the time.

          • Hm

            I’ve been on the internet a long time. I have seen many many different types of bad faith users and people I disagree with. That part isn’t the part that led me to jump to “these accounts are fake.”

            I feel like I’ve already explained why I feel there are propaganda accounts, or the difference between someone I disagree with vs. someone who has weird little inconsistencies in their story in addition to a pattern of behavior that’s very unlike any other type of authentic user I’ve ever seen before. Who I also, on top of that, disagree with.

            This whole core of this post reads like "I like this, BUT there are totally fake posters and we need to call them out".

            Because as you pointed out, calling out the fake posters directly doesn’t usually lead anywhere good. Surely you can understand the idea that I’m saying the flood of propaganda is a bad thing, but also that I can agree that adding a flood of arguing and impossible-to-prove accusations on top is also a further bad thing?

            In all likelihood you're probably wrong

            Glad we cleared that up, then.

      • Attack the argument, not the person.

        Pretty sure that's a Rule 1 ban for you there.

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