Somebody told me that the robot moderator is susceptible to vote-rigging, and with my blessing they're giving me hundreds of downvotes to try to get me banned from my own community. I don't think it is going to work, but it's useful as an experiment.

It's clearly well beyond the point of what would work in real life, since the admins would notice and ban the attempt, as they have some more subtle vote-rigging efforts in the past. I think that, even in the world in which you could get away with giving out hundreds of automated downvotes without someone noticing, this kind of thing wouldn't work, but I have been wrong before.

To be honest, I don't think the article makes its case very well. I think Netanyahu is just doing Netanyahu things, and the impact of the current regional war on the US presidential election is pretty far from his mind. It lists some examples from the past which are interesting, but it doesn't draw any type of solid connection between the current war and the US election. It's reaching.

I do agree with you that anyone in US politics who is expecting Netanyahu to do them any favors or be responsible with the US or Israel's best interests, hasn't been paying attention for years.

Reasonable. I wasn't trying to jump down your throat about it. I was a little annoyed at the comments which are positing some sort of fantasy scenario where the bot is useful, but where people hate it for irrational reasons. But yours was a reasonable question, definitely, in particular because for at least one account, it looks like what you described is exactly what's happening.

Big if true.

They have not. I just did some analysis of it, and there is one person whose account has downvoted almost every comment that the bot has left. They have around a thousand other votes, so it's unlikely to be a single-issue votebot account, but they also have no posts or comments, which is suspect. It seems plausible that there's something mechanical going on which might be concerning. On the other hand, it's only one person. There is one other person who has given so many downvotes to the bot that it's suspicious, also.

Aside from those two accounts, it all looks like real downvotes. There are accounts which have given hundreds of downvotes to the bot, but they're all recognizable as highly active real accounts, so it makes sense that they would give mass downvotes to the bot.

People just don't like the bot. Have you considered listening to the pretty extensive explanations they've given in this comments section as to why?

I'm saying that the bot is incorrect. Look up any pro-Palestinian or -Arab source on it, and you'll find a pretty bald-faced statement that it is factually suspect, because its viewpoint is anti-Israel. Look up the New York Times, which regularly reports factually untrue things, including one which caused a major journalistic scandal near the beginning of the war in Gaza, and check its factual rating.

Every report of bias is from somebody's point of view. That part I have no issue with. Pretending that a source is or isn't factual depending on whether it matches your particular bias is something different entirely.

Can you give an example of someone who ever posted something disingenuous that MediaBiasFactCheck got in the way of?

It also has links to ground.news baked into it, despite that site being pretty useless from what I can tell. I get strong sponsorship vibes

It all just suddenly clicked into place for me.

I think there's a strong possibility that you're right. It would explain all the tortured explanations for why the bot is necessary, coupled with the absolute determination to keep it regardless of how much negative feedback it's getting. Looking at it as a little ad included in every comments section makes the whole thing make sense in a way that, taken at face value, it doesn't.

Most people don't want the bot to be there, because they don't agree with its opinion about what is "biased." It claims factually solid sources are non-factual if they don't agree with the author's biases, and it overlooks significant editing of the truth in sources that agree with the author's biases.

In addition, one level up the meta, opposition to the bot has become a fashionable way to rebel against the moderation, which is always a crowd pleaser. The fact that the politics moderators keep condescendingly explaining that they're just looking out for the best interests of the community, and the bot is obviously a good thing and the majority of the community that doesn't want it is getting their pretty little heads confused about things, instigates a lot of people to smash the downvote button reflexively whenever they see its posts.

You found another bug in throwaway account detection! I've undeleted this comment and, hopefully, fixed the new one too. Sorry about that.

This comment was deleted, but it shouldn't have been. The code to aggressively delete comments from users who don't have enough data to rank them, meaning potentially throwaway accounts, was malfunctioning, and deleted everything from any accounts without recent activity. It's only supposed to trigger if that user has some downvotes, but it was deleting anything.

I've fixed the code and restored the comment.

And yes, I'm aware of the irony involved. To answer your point, I picked a terrible name for this community. People are not required to upvote you or agree with you, or even be nice to you. It's meant as a place without toxic low-effort trolling, but certainly people are allowed to hit the downvote button to quickly express disapproval in addition to giving some more well-considered reasons for disagreeing with the stated argument.

What I was going for, unsuccessfully, by saying "pleasant" was that this person can say something like this viewpoint, and other people can disagree with them, but it doesn't turn into a dumpster fire of personal insults, changes of subject, and wild accusations. At that, I think it's succeeding, looking at this thread. People are not agreeing but it's a lot calmer than an equivalent thread in a lot of Lemmy's politics communities would be.

This comment was deleted, but it shouldn't have been. The code to aggressively delete comments from users who don't have enough data to rank them, meaning potentially throwaway accounts, was malfunctioning, and deleted everything from any accounts without recent activity. It's only supposed to trigger if that user has some downvotes, but it was deleting anything.

I've fixed the code and restored the comment.

I’d rather we stage a revolution and do away with the current electoral system in favor of one that allows more than two viable parties.

These are in no way incompatible. Not electing Trump will do a huge amount to protect the people who are working on revolution doing away with the current system.

Also, I believe that not caring about the outcome is a valid stance. If you genuinely don’t have any interest in it, don’t have a firm opinion about the candidates, or whatever, it’s fine to not vote. You’d essentially be flipping a coin anyway, so let the folks that care have their say instead.

If you don't care about the outcome of Harris versus Trump, then you're either not aware of what's going on, or in a position of extreme privilege. You're not a Haitian, or a Hispanic, or God help you an undocumented immigrant, or a left-wing person living in a Trump-supporting area, or anyone who's near the poverty line, or any other number of categories of people that Trump is going to do incredible levels of harm to.

You also don't live on Earth, or else you're going to die with no descendants before the most serious impacts of climate change start to come to fruition.

If you want to improve the current system, "abstaining as a protest" is selling a huge number of helpless and vulnerable people to suffer or die, for no particular benefit to anybody. That's the point of this article.

It never even occurred to me that carbon capture might be storing a giant tank of gaseous carbon dioxide. I assumed that it meant chemically reacting the carbon into some kind of solid material which was then discarded as waste, because trying to store huge chambers full of gaseous CO2 at a scale that can impact climate change is clinically insane.

Yes, not all young men are stupid. That's an unfair stereotype. I do think it's fair to say that as a group, they're more likely to be too disorganized to vote, compared with other demographics, and I think that's doubly true of the subset of them that Trump is trying to appeal to by appearing on bro podcasts.

I think you missed the big triangle you have to click on.

Here's a transcript:

Election workers, the vast majority of them women, say they're feeling vulnerable to the charged political climate surrounding the 2024 election. 38% of the women staffing the polls say they've experienced threats, harassment, or abuse, fueling the violence, disinformation, and conspiracy theories following the 2020 election.

Joining us now, Elizabeth Landers, lead correspondent for the Scripps News Disinformation Desk.

"And Liz, you traveled to Surrey County in North Carolina to really dig deep on this. What did you find?"

"We traveled there back in June to get a sense of how disinformation is impacting election workers, specifically the almost all-female team that heads up Surrey County's elections. This is a small county. It's about 70,000 people. It's best known as the birthplace of Andy Griffith. And it's overwhelmingly a red Republican area, went 75% for the former president in 2020. Despite that though, and despite him winning that area, this small community has been dealing with mis- and disinformation around the elections since they took place."

"And the woman who heads up the elections there is Michelle Huff. She's a team of just four other people helping her administer these elections. They're working on this year-round. She described to us how things have changed since 2020. Take a listen."

"I was actually in one store in downtown Mount Airy. I was cornered and pressed for 20 minutes. This person was getting everything that they felt 2020 election that Trump did not win because of what election officials in this country did. Even in my church, all of sudden election officials are people to not be trusted and not believe."

"And Allie, disinformation in Surrey County for Michelle really reached a head in 2022. She said there were people that showed up at their office, confronted her about their voting systems, were asking her to see the voting machines, which the North Carolina State Board of Elections says that would have been illegal to give access to people who are not allowed to be around voting machines, that access to critical infrastructure there. They said they had evidence that the voting machines were pinging cell towers in 2020. So they were pushing conspiracies and unfounded information to her."

"And Michelle has said that she has had to harden their office, make changes there that she never thought that she would have to consider the safety of herself, her staff, her family. But really, she has in the last four years. And she is concerned about this in the lead up to the election in November."

"It makes a lot of sense, especially given the fact that this is a county that went so squarely for Trump. And yet the aspersions and bad faith that he has put upon the election system writ large are clearly even playing out in red counties. So then given what we saw in 2020, given what she's experiencing in counties like this one, what's being done to protect election workers? And I also imagine that this is impacting the number of people who want to be election workers."

"Absolutely. The Brennan Center for Justice, who we interviewed for this piece, says that they are losing election workers at sort of an unprecedented rate right now. People just don't want to do this kind of work because of these threats and harassment that they're dealing with. And in addition to that, they're losing the institutional knowledge. There's a lot of minutiae that are involved in election administration. Every state in this country has a different way that they administer these elections. So the Brennan Center is concerned about that."

"And I would also just add to that 80 percent of these election workers in this country are female. So part of the reason that we were focused on this story is because we've been tracking how disinformation is impacting women over at Scripps News. We've been kind of doing a series on this. And this is really impacting election workers because so many of them are women across the country, Allie."

"Really great reporting, Liz. It's going to have a long tail as we go into the 2024 election cycle. Thank you for tracking it and thank you for bringing it to us."

I don't see anything about preventing corporate landlords from buying it all and renting it back to us.

The source is the video. I found a news story about the event, but it was cringey, so I decided the video spoke for itself.

I agree. It's working well at what I intended it to be, in my opinion, but the name is flat-out wrong at this point.

I made a post with my evaluation of the bot's ability to create a space where people can disagree without being horrible about it. I think it's succeeding at that, and these contentious topics are a good test case, since it's not meant to create a space for only pleasant topics. The name is misleading. I don't know why I didn't expect this, but I didn't.

What do you think? I'm interesting in hearing feedback on how people are receiving the content they're seeing here. If the bot is working in my opinion, but the result from the reader isn't good, that's an issue.

I made !pleasantpolitics@slrpnk.net to test a new moderation approach which is designed to filter out a lot of the crap. I think you should try posting some articles there, and see whether you see the same hyper-critical anti-Biden content. I think I know what you're talking about, and I think the filtering bot will probably be able to detect and ban almost all of the users you're talking about.