phase_change

Ok, this is not going to be a well formulated question, because the concerns behind it are nebulous in my own head.

Some assumptions I have, that clearly inform the question that follows: I believe commercial, state, and others have sophisticated methods of influencing what I see on social media and thus, in part, what I think. I also believe that someone more willing to believe in the types of conspiratorial beliefs I’ve just expressed are more likely to be manipulated by information they’re exposed to. And, yes, I fully appreciate the irony of those beliefs.

My child is adult enough that belief patterns I encourage are very unlikely to become deep patterns. That is, I’d have to work to indoctinate my son, and he’d actively resist if my indoctrination was outside of societal norms.

He didn’t grow up exposed to the social media I suspect children do now.

How does a parent inoculate a child to the influence of social media without also creating a mindset willing to believe in a nebulous “them” that controls things—a mindset, I believe, that makes a person more likely to be controlled?

It’s not even June 12 for me, yet I suspect many subreddits went dark based on UTC.

I moved to Reddit during the Digg migration. Thus, I got the default subscriptions from back in the day. Over the years, I’ve unsubscribed to things I felt were crap, and I’ve added a number of subreddits.

Already, many have gone dark. My old.Reddit.com homepage already looks much different than normal, and I know that a few subreddits that do show have announced they’ll go dark. I assume they are US based and timing that locally.

I’ve spent more time in the Lemmy fediverse than on Reddit since joining, but I’ve spent time on both.

I’ll admit to cynical skepticism of the impact of the darkening. I still don’t think it will make a difference in Reddit policy, but I now believe it will have a larger impact on Reddit traffic than I imagined.

I still expect it to have no change in Reddit attitude or really in Reddit users.

So, in thinking about how bad actors might manipulate Lemmy, I have some questions.

In this scenario, I’m an entity that wants to influence social media, a government, a corporation, a collection of dedicated degenerates—pick your boojum. I see this growing Lemmy thing. I figure it’s not a serious threat, but if I’m wrong, I’d like to be placed to influence things via what people see. I want to be able to upvote or downvote posts.

If I’ve got a decent budget, I’d spin up a bunch of new Lemmy instances and encourage signups when there’s this mad rush from Reddit. I’d want as many real users as I can get. I’d also create a bunch of sock puppet accounts on all of my instances. I’d probably have some of them post and comment.

If Lemmy attains critical mass, I’d be able to use those sock puppets to upvote/downvote posts I want to influence.

I (now the OP, not the hypothetical bad actor) imagine this is hard to defend against. I also imagine federation is all or nothing. That is, either you federate everything from a server or you federate nothing.

Are their granular federation options, like allowing post federation but ignoring upvote/downvote federation?