Okay so here’s what happened.
There is a mod of some AI-generated image forums who has been slinging out bans for “anti-AI trolling” to people who have never participated in their community, apparently more or less at random. Full disclosure, I am one of those people, and I’m confident I have never done any anti-AI trolling.
Apparently the justification for this is that other people are being aggressively hateful to this mod, coming in and being incredibly abusive, transphobic, insulting her for alleged alcoholism and making fake pictures of her and generally just being horrible. Conveniently, one of these people showed up in the thread where we were talking about it, on cue, and started slinging around horribleness which provided a convenient cover for people to say “And THAT’s why we have to be really strict with the bans!” type of things. We never really got to the bottom of what the connection was between that and the random bans to other people who were longstanding accounts that didn’t seem to be doing any of those things.
Anyway, now another abusive alt of the (now obviously bannned) abusive alt that originally stirred up trouble has made a pitch-perfect effort to inflame divisions and create a balkanization between the “pro AI” people, centered around dbzer0 (edit: and blahaj), and “anti AI” people, centered around everywhere else.
This is two identical posts, made to two separate communities which are guaranteed to have totally opposite takes on it based on their different levels of information about the issue, which will then lead everyone to assume that the other community is just being horrible about it on purpose when they draw different conclusions:
(Edit: The troll has now been banned, so I can’t link to their posts anymore. Just imagine this post, except made by one of the trolls who are featured in the comments of that post, you can dig in the modlog or in spoiler text of some other comments to see some of what they were saying. Anyway, the troll posted the exact same complaint about being “unfairly” banned both to lemmy.world, where they got tons of sympathy and upvotes, and to dbzer0, where people who were aware of what they were up to gave them derision and downvotes.)
Like I said, if the goal is to create division and heated argument between two opposing “camps,” this is pretty much as perfect as you can get it. I expect it to work, at least to a certain amount, to get people embittered towards one another and arguing about the issue impassioned that the other side is wrong and stupid.
I can’t find the link right now, but there was someone on reddit who claimed that they used to do this professionally (trying to disrupt online communities so that organized shilling could succeed better there, because the previous coherence that they had had had been replaced by confusion and bickering, and then they could insert bullshit without it being pushed back on as strongly.) It’s fascinating. What they described isn’t exactly like this, but it definitely sort of rings similar to me. Just to throw that out there.
Also, UniversalMonk is involved, because of course he is.
Edit: Fun with grammar
Hang on, you’re telling me I can be randomly banned from AI communities?
How do I get my name on the list for sure? I don’t want to have to just hope the randomness gods smile on me.
You could just block them you know.
I have no interest in communities dedicated to female celebrities. When they started cropping up, I blocked them (well until I found out it was mostly one user creating the communities and then posting to them, so I just blocked them, but… Same result).
Its pretty easy, about two clicks typically.
Amazing how many on Lemmy refuse to do that, and instead just complain. lol
Why block when you can harass! That’s more sane and normal, right?
Right? And as for the people accusing me of sealioning, that is one of the most made-up, fake terms I have ever seen.
I had literally never even heard the word sealioning until someone threw it at me on Lemmy. I had to have it explained to me multiple times, and even after reading the definition, I still don’t think it is a real thing.
I’m not that smart. So when I ask, “What does that mean?” it’s because I genuinely do not know. But somehow, just asking basic questions gets me accused of sealioning.
I still remember the first time it happened. And then I asked what sealioning was, and my question got removed for sealioning. Lol. Good times.
And that goofy cartoon people always post to explain it still makes no sense in ninety percent of the cases where I see the term thrown around.
I was hoping I wouldn’t need to do any work and the AI people would just automatically save me from them.
Guess AI disappoints yet again…
I don’t think being banned prevents it from showing up on your feed. Best to block as you scroll.
They might ban you preemptively, actually.
I’m just saying you have a readily available tool at your fingertips, which you could use rather than just complain about the existence of a community you apparently haven’t even seen.