• potpie@beehaw.org
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    11 months ago

    Woah there chief! Lemme tell everyone a little story…

    Back when I was on Reddit, I followed any and all Trump news (and especially Jan 6 investigation news) on an unhealthily regular basis. These kinds of Eeyore comments were extremely common and usually voted up to pepper through the top ⅓ of all the ‘best’ comments. It got so bad that some subreddits explicitly banned them, though it didn’t really end the practice.

    Then Russia invaded Ukraine. All the disparaging comments ceased immediately. The frequency absolutely fell off a cliff, because all those comments were being served up to us by Russian bots. Russia wants nothing more than to further destabilize the US as well as any other democratic institution.

    I’m not saying this comment right here is a Russian bot, but it’s definitely doing a Russian bot’s job by trying to undermine any confidence we might have in the concepts of justice or democracy.