He generally shows most of the signs of the misinformation accounts:
- Wants to repeatedly tell basically the same narrative and nothing else
- Narrative is fundamentally false
- Not interested in any kind of conversation or in learning that what he’s posting is backwards from the values he claims to profess
I also suspect that it’s not a coincidence that this is happening just as the Elon Musks of the world are ramping up attacks on Wikipedia, specially because it is a force for truth in the world that’s less corruptible than a lot of the others, and tends to fight back legally if someone tries to interfere with the free speech or safety of its editors.
Anyway, YSK. I reported him as misinformation, but who knows if that will lead to any result.
Edit: Number of people real salty that I’m talking about this: Lots
The entire 485 word intro to his Wikipedia page is unsourced:
I’m pretty sure it’s Elon.
There are a shocking number of Elmo simps.
DOWNLOAD A COPY OF WIKIPEDIA NOW. RIGHT NOW. DO NOT WAIT.
WIKIPEDIA WILL BE RUINED IN (just guessing) THREE MONTHS (I hope I’m wrong)
Do download a copy of Wikipedia but give them some credit. This isn’t the first nor last attack on information freedom (see internet archive)
Can I get a TLDR. I’m on the page about downloading it, but there are so many files to download which makes me think I am looking at the wrong stuff.
People posting misinformation? On Lemmy? No. It can’t be.
I heard the guy who wrote Lemmy ate a GMO tomato, and enjoyed it.
Misinformation… you mean lies?
You can use true statements to spread misinformation, I guess.
How does that work?
Misinformation and lies are only separated by intent.
Lemmy is too small to be a worthwhile target for musk-like campaigns. It’s usually just people escaping their echo chambers to get their rage fix. If you’re able to think for yourself, there’s really no negative impact and scrolling past is a great solution.
in a bot world no niche is too small to fill with digital garbage
The misinfo crowd has been twiddling their collective thumbs since the election and trump winning. Can’t make up bs about egg and gas prices anymore. They’re half-ass trying to incite intergenerational conflict between X, Z, millenials, etc. Guess they found a new target. Exact same MO. Repeat the claim ad nauseam, refuse to acknowledge any contrary argument, their argument is objectively false.
The politically elite are so used to puppeteering public sentiment with ease, and so confident in their efforts to suppress education in America that they have stopped trying to be sneaky. All American ‘news’ is propaganda and the this is a blatant attempt to divide the public on one of the last free resources for factual information**. Free as in non-criminalized. These types of posts by EM are to incite division in order to amp-up for the criminalization of information. And it’s not very difficult to see.
**factual when readers uphold its integrity through critical consumption and editing.
Those tactics won’t really work here but if there’s a small army of them on super low IQ platforms their lies can spread.
On lemmy, this is far more likely to be some weird tankie shit about western propaganda. Though it is definitely noteworthy that the far right and far left seem to push a lot of the same misinformation on here.
Also, in general lemmy trolls are super easy to spot because they don’t do anything else. All they do is whine about democrats or post Russian propaganda and never engage on any other topics.
Thinking of the most recent so-called “far left” thing I saw about Wikipedia, it was a video by BadEmpanada talking about the different portrayals of the Uyghur situation in China. A pretty balanced take btw, looking pretty impartially at all evidence and questioning the mindset of people with different perspectives on it. The discussion of WIkipedia there was that it does naturally take on some bias due to a reliance on Western media as authoritative or reliable sources. I think that is a fact. There’s a process to determine something as fact which I think is too quick, the second there’s something of a perceived consensus of experts or authoritative sources, something is stated as fact. In hard sciences, that’s typically fine, but in politics or recent history, IMHO you need a much more meticulous approach, because you’re in dangerous territory the second you start treating any propaganda narrative as fact.
Yeah horseshoe theory is an actual thing and it shows hard here on Lemmy. Same lies, same taxticts, different extremists.
Horseshoe theory doesn’t fit-- it’s stethoscope theory
Dammit. That’s too funny and I want someone to share this with but nobody i know is the right mix of wierd to get it
In this case it’s not so much horseshoe theory as it is that most tankies on lemmy are just trolls, or teenagers parroting trolls.
There are major issues with wikipedia, I say this as someone with thousands of edits. But I know exactly who you are talking about and they spread pure BS.
The last time I saw them their account was called “ihatewikipedia” or “fuckwikipedia” or something like that lol and they were just spreading conspiracies. Or useless drama. Like they were going on about how wikipedia “invades your privacy”, it IP blocks people and tracks IP’s linked to editing.
it IP blocks people and tracks IP’s linked to editing
Unless something changed, this part was at least partially true at one point. But only for anonymous edits iirc. Usually happened for IPs shared by a lot of people like from a campus or some VPNs, probably due to a lot of vandalism from such IPs.
Yes it does. That was my response to them. But this is pretty acceptable to prevent vandalism.
There’s an option to donate on their website here: https://donate.wikipedia.org/ I’m starting monthly at $5 and possibly bumping up to $10 later on.
The wikimedia foundation has hundreds of millions of dollars in assets.
There was a big “information” campaign against donating to wikipedia say 6 months - 2 years ago, anyone know what happened/why?
Last time I heard about wikipedia’s donation campaign (maybe
24 years ago or so), it was notorious for advertising in such a way as to imply your funds would be used to keep wikipedia alive, whereas the reality was that only a small part of Wikimedia Foundation’s income was needed for Wikipedia, and the rest was spent on rather questionable things like funding very weird research with little oversight. Did this change? If it didn’t, I wouldn’t particularly advise anyone to donate to them.Pathos is a simple marketing mode that is one of three used by every company and I don’t really see a problem with it. It’s intentionally contrary to the one for-profit companies use to gain revenue—fear.
I actually took a look at Wikipedia’s accounts last week as I remembered that campaign when I saw the latest campaign and did some due diligence before donating. I didn’t donate, but I’m still glad Wikipedia exists.
What I remembered: That hosting costs were tiny and Wikimedia foundation had enough already saved up to operate for over a hundred years without raising any more.
What I saw: That if that was true, it isn’t any longer. It’s managed growth.
I don’t think they are at any risk of financial collapse, but they are cutting their cloth to suit their income. That’s normal in business, including charities. If you stop raising money, you stagnate. You find things to spend that money on that are within the charity’s existing aims.
Some highlights from 2024: $106million in wages. 26m in awards and grants. 6m in “travel and conferences”. Those last two look like optional spends to me, but may be rewards to the volunteer editors. The first seems high, but this is only a light skim
Net assets at EOY = $271 million. Hosting costs per year are $3million. It’s doing okay.
If you’re curious; https://wikimediafoundation.org/about/financial-reports/
Love that everyone on this thread is a financial analyst and a 501c consultant.
For-profit companies have the slim margins they do because they’ve successfully detached humanity from their spending obligations. Wikipedia does not need to do quarterly global lay-offs or labor off-shoring when their technology doesn’t meet release deadlines. They are a nonprofit. They exist to bring factual, accessible information to the world. If you support for this cause, donate. If you don’t, don’t donate or don’t use. If you care for the cause but want the CEO to take a paycut, well, find them one who will stick around for more than a few years on less than the average mega CEO salary. Because most of them have not.
Well, that’s definitely a super trustworthy thing, not at all relevant to the question of whether there is misinformation floating around that is targeted at Wikipedia.
I looked up their financial reports somewhere else in these comments when talking to someone else, and long story short, it’s not true. Also, just to annoy anyone who’s trying to spread this type of misinformation, I just set up a recurring $10/month donation to Wikipedia. I thought about including a note specifically requesting that it be used only for rather questionable things and funding very weird research, but there wasn’t a space for it.
I wondered when writing my comment whether people would combine this with the vague statement in the opening post and conclude “aha, I will now take this as misinformation without checking”, but then I looked at your other comments and saw you were actually talking about some India-related conspiracy I heard nothing about. Yet apparently you nevertheless think my comment is intentional misinfo?? That isn’t very coherent, is it now?
This perspective is very common in online communities about any sort of charity or non-profit.
“Don’t donate money to whatever charity, they just waste the money on whatever thing”
Truthfully, it’s just an excuse to assuage the guilt arising from refusing to support these organisations.
Usually it’s a gateway argument towards the right…
Truthfully, it’s just an excuse to assuage the guilt arising from refusing to support these organisations.
Sometimes.
Sometimes it’s a pretty accurate statement.
I used to run a medium-large charity. I have a fair bit of experience in fundraising and management. Most donators would be shocked at how little their donation actually achieves in isolation. Also at the waste that often goes on, and certainly the salaries at the upper tiers.
And I could also say that guilt is exactly why people donate. It’s to feel good about themselves, they’re buying karma. Central heating for the soul. I won’t say that’s a bad thing, but it is a thing. It’s also exactly how charities fundraise, because it works. That’s why your post and tv adverts are full of pictures of sad children crying. Every successful charity today is that way because it knows how to manipulate potential supporters. Is that always wrong? Of course not, charities couldn’t do good things without money. But sometimes the ethics in fundraising are extremely flexible.
I will investigate this claim independently.
That’s not allowed on Wikipedia, you have to use verifiable information from reliable secondary sources instead.
really wish there was a way to pay with “Google play” because I found a way to get Google play money by lying to google lol
Opinion rewards?
Well, Google takes 15 to 30% off the in-app purchases made through Google Play, so you would probably be giving back Google their own money anyways, plus it would fool many people who might think they’re giving 10€ when actually they’re only giving 8,50€ or 7€ to Wikipedia and the rest to Google.
Better than letting that survey money expire and staying 100% with Google.
I’m donating 10 a month. Least I can do. It’s one of the last “good” places on the internet
It’s likely this is a bot if it’s wide spread. And Lemmy is INCREDIBLY ill suited to handle even the dumbest of bots from 10+ years ago. Nevermind social media bots today.
To be fair, it’s virtually impossible to tell whether a text was written by an AI or not. If some motivated actor is willing to spend money to generate quality LLM output, they can post as much as they want on virtually all social media sites.
The internet is in the process of eating itself as we speak.
You don’t analyze the text necessary, you analyze the heuristics, behavioral patterns, sentiment…etc It’s data analysis and signal processing.
You, as a user, probably can’t. Because you lack information that the platform itself is in a position to gather and aggregate that data.
There’s a science to it, and it’s not perfect. Some companies keep their solutions guarded because of the time and money required to mature their systems & ML models to identify artificial behavior.
But it requires mature tooling at the very least, and Lemmy has essentially none of that.
yes of course there are many different data points you can use. along with complex math you can also feed a lot of these data points in machine learning models and get useful systems that can perhaps red flag certain accounts and then have processes with more scrutiny that require more resources (such as a human reviewing)
websites like chess.com do similar things to find cheaters. and they (along with lichess) have put out some interesting material going over some of what their process looks like
here i have two things. one is that lichess, which is mostly developed and maintained by a single individual, is able to maintain an effective anti-cheat system. so I don’t think it’s impossible that lemmy is able to accomplish these types of heuristics and behavioral tracking
the second thing is that these new AIs are really good. it’s not just the text, but the items you mentioned. for example I train a machine learning model and then a separate LLM on all of reddit’s history. the first model is meant to try and emulate all of the “normal” human flags. make it so it posts at hours that would match the trends. vary the sentiments in a natural way. etc. post at not random intervals of time but intervals of time that looks like a natural distribution, etc. the model will find patterns that we can’t imagine and use those to blend in
so you not only spread the content you want (whether it’s subtle product promotion or nation-state propaganda) but you have a separate model trained to disguise that text as something real
that’s the issue it’s not just the text but if you really want to do this right (and people with $$$ have that incentive) as of right now it’s virtually impossible to prevent a motivated actor from doing this. and we are starting to see this with lichess and chess.com.
the next generation of cheaters aren’t just using chess engines like Stockfish, but AIs trained to play like humans. it’s becoming increasingly difficult.
the only reason it hasn’t completely taken over the platform is because it’s expensive. you need a lot of computing power to do this effectively. and most people don’t have the resources or the technical ability to make this happen.
spend money to generate quality LLM output, they can post as much as they want on virtually all social media sites.
$20 for a chatgpt pro account and fractions of pennies to run a bot server. It’s really extremely cheap to do this.
I don’t have an answer to how to solve the “motivated actor” beyond mass tagging/community effort.
$20 for a chatgpt pro account and fractions of pennies to run a bot server. It’s really extremely cheap to do this.
openAI has checks for this type of thing. They limit number of requests per hour with the regular $20 subscription
you’d have to use the API and that comes at a cost per request, depending on which model you are using. it can get expensive very quickly depending on what scale of bot manipulation you are going for
openAI has checks for this type of thing.
Yep, any operation runs the risk of getting caught by OpenAI.
See this article of it happening:
https://openai.com/index/disrupting-a-covert-iranian-influence-operation/
Heuristics, data analysis, signal processing, ML models…etc
It’s about identifying artificial behavior not identifying artificial text, we can’t really identify artificial text, but behavioral patterns are a higher bar for botters to get over.
The community isn’t in a position to do anything about it the platform itself is the only one in a position to gather the necessary data to even start targeting the problem.
I can’t target the problem without first collecting the data and aggregating it. And Lemmy doesn’t do much to enable that currently.
But something like Reddit at least potentially has the resources to throw some money at the problem. They can employ advanced firewalls and other anti-bot/anti-AI thingies. It’s very possible that they’re pioneering some state-of-the-art stuff in that area.
Lemmy is a few commies and their pals. Unless China is bankrolling them, they’re out of their league.
Ur a bot. I can tell by the
pixelsunicode.Edit: joking aside you bring up a good point and our security through
anonymitycultural irrelevance will not last forever. Or maybe it will.Unfortunately it won’t, assuming Lemmy grows.
Lemmy doesn’t get targeted by bots because it’s obscure, you don’t reach much of an audience and you don’t change many opinions.
It has, conservatively, ~0.005% (Yes, 0.005%, not a typo) of the monthly active users.
To put that into perspective, theoretically, $1 spent on a Reddit has 2,000,000x more return on investment than on Lemmy.
All that needs to happen is that number to become more favorable.
Wikipedia is an alien plot to get Earthlings to read more. DON’T FALL FOR IT!!! . . . ./s
Please donate to Wikipedia if you can.
I’ve heard wikipedia has alot of money anyway but i don’t know.
Wikipedia financials can be found here under Finances. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation
Here’s another good summary: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Guy_Macon/Wikipedia_has_Cancer
Many people say
What has that got to do with the price of fish?
did you reply to the wrong thing? or you specialize in bad jokes that are impossible for anyone to think funny?
Is it space karen?
Interesting all this WP news I’m hearing today. Last week I downloaded the entirety of Wikipedia. Anyone can do it, the base archive (no pictures) is only about 25G, although the torrent is slow AF, took me… almost 2 weeks to download it.
I did this because I feel like this might be the last chance to get a version of it that has any vestige of the old order in it, the old order being “trying to stick to ideals and express truth rather than rewriting history to the fascists’ specifications.”
I’d love to be wrong, but if I’m not, I feel like it will potentially be a good reference in the future if needed.
This is in the news because Wikipedia is refusing to rewrite history to the fascists’ specifications.
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cdrdydkypv7o
It’s possible that India will succeed at eroding by a little bit Wikipedia’s resistance to having things rewritten because of various powerful people demanding it. But, if you’re looking for an organization that’s resistant against those demands, I don’t think you will be able to find one that is anywhere near the equal of Wikipedia in terms of the scale at which it operates combined with the resistance it puts up when people do this.
Wow, they really sued the Wikimedia Foundation instead of trying to find a reliable source to refute the article’s claims. I looked up the edits they made. They removed content, citing various Wikipedia policies that govern how the article should be phrased.
In general, so long as the information is presented in a neutral, matter-of-fact manner and cites a reliable source, it can go in the article. Wikipedia’s job is to summarize what reliable sources say about a subject.
So all ANI would’ve needed to do was find a reliable source (preferably more than one) refuting the claims they want to refute. The most they’d likely be able to do is put both points of view in the article rather than removing one point of view entirely from the article, which is what they were trying to do.
Instead, they went to court about it.
That’s interesting and terrifying all at once. If the Indian government is successful, it will basically set the precedent for other powerful entities such as autocrats, oligarchs, and corporations to also force Wikipedia to edit their content to suit their desires. I donate frequently and will keep making sure they can win.
Shit. I better donate.
I donate every year and they made it easier than ever this year if you use Apple Pay or anything equivalent. Like 15 seconds and that includes chhosing amount.
edit: for us with the lazys
Thanks for posting this. I just gave my entire Apple Cash balance. I had no idea what I was gonna use it for and this seemed likea worthy cause. Wikipedia just got $140 because of you.
Kiwix is a self hostable option for this, and you can get other content databases as well, like wikiHow, iFixit, and Khan Academy.
The downloads are much faster than two weeks too.
Just some context, Hetzner gave the shaft to the Kiwix project and took down their content servers without any apparent notice (Kiwix’s side of the story at least), and they had to rebuild it with another provider.
Interesting, that’s too bad. Seems like it’s not an uncommon occurrence for Hetzner.
