- cross-posted to:
- [email protected]
- cross-posted to:
- [email protected]
Disinformation similar to the pro-Russian “Matryoshka” campaign is emerging on Bluesky, using deepfakes and fake profiles to spread pro-Russian messages, prompting calls for more proactive action from the platform.
That’s why institutions should be on mastodon, not bluesky. @[email protected] is much more recognizable than whatever bluesky has.
The Feddiverse doesn’t really protect against these kind of campaigns. That’s up to the instances themselves.
And it’s not about mimicking official accounts. It’s about spreading and gaining traction to specific opinions. It’s known that disinformation campaigns have been targeting posts from real politicians. They boost the opinion while also boosting a counter opinion. Not to mention spread hate in the comments below them.
The Fediverse is terrible at handling misinformation, maybe its biggest flaw. The budget is precisely $0 and it shows.
Misinformation shouldn’t be a main concern of the internet.
Whenever you go on the internet you should instead get a big “EVERYTHING ON THE INTERNET IS A LIE” disclaimer in your face.
It’s easier to limit wrong information than how critical mass can understand information
It gives a false sense of trust. If you trust everything on the internet, you’ll trust everything on the internet.
Kind of. Limiting false information can’t reach an absolute point, so there’s always something to be not trusted so it will still cause less harm than a population not being able to discern falsehoods from an unlimited amount.
I think a huge problem for the fediverse is going to be these kinds of coordinated troll campaigns. It will be so easy for them to launder accounts through undermoderated instances that are federated with their targets.
Veracity of news is important though. Some random person claiming Gandi rapes kids would carry much less weight than @[email protected] saying so. “News” from some mastodon.social account would (hopefully) get more scrutiny.
If Mastodon were as big as Bluesky is, it would also have this problem.
BlueSky’s verification system lets you make your handle any URL you own (via DNS or a meta tag in your HTML). Like the Washington Post’s handle is just @washingtonpost.com
That seems like a pretty trivial thing for any institution to setup even if most users are just going to stick with the default (“whatever dot bsky dot social”), if only because a URL costs a few dollars a year.
Not that I disagree about institutions being on Mastodon. Important government agencies should be basically everywhere. (Like a local weather service that issues critical safety warnings should be on every service possible.)