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

    • PhilipTheBucket@ponder.catOP
      2·
      2 months ago

      Yeah, there’s kind of a Poe’s Law situation.

      A lot of the sincere tankies, though, at least want to talk about what they’re into, and have elaborate reasons why it’s all true. The low-effort “I can’t even be bothered to try to mount a defense, I just wanted to say Wikipedia is doxing its users and kowtowing to fascist governments, and now that I’ve said it my task is done” behavior is a little more indicative of a disingenuous propaganda account in my experience.

      • Serinus@lemmy.world
        4·
        2 months ago

        elaborate reasons why it’s all true

        Usually it’s “just read these 10 hundred-year-old books” that they absolutely have not read.

        And if you ask them to make a point from those books, they can’t. Apparently they’re only comprehensible as a whole.

      • Clent@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
        1·
        2 months ago

        That’s now poe’s law, it would be Occam’s razor.

        The most likely scenario here is not many puppet accounts spreading sarcasm or parody but rather that there are many actors that all true believers in what they are all saying. They sound the same because they are feeding off the same talking point.

    • socsa@piefed.socialEnglish
      0·
      2 months ago

      I am pretty convinced that .ml is legitimately used as a Russian troll training ground before they get promoted to Facebook and reddit.

      • dx1@lemmy.world
        0·
        2 months ago

        Meanwhile, at .ml:

        Since Pi is infinite and non-repeating, would that mean any finite sequence of non-repeating numbers should appear somewhere in Pi?

        • PhilipTheBucket@ponder.catOP
          1·
          2 months ago

          That’s actually a really good way to illustrate what is wrong with lemmy.ml.

          On math stack exchange:

          Let me summarize the things that have been said which are true and add one more thing.

          1. 𝜋 is not known to have this property, but it is expected to be true.
          2. This property does not follow from the fact that the decimal expansion of 𝜋 is infinite and does not repeat.

          On lemmy.ml:

          0.101001000100001000001 . . .

          I’m infinite and non-repeating. Can you find a 2 in me?

          You can’t prove that there isn’t one somewhere

          Why couldn’t you?

          Because you’d need to search through an infinite number of digits (unless you have access to the original formula)

          And:

          Not just any all finite number sequence appear in pi

          And:

          Yes.

          And if you’re thinking of a compression algorithm, nope, pigeonhole principle.

          All heavily upvoted.

  • Shelbyeileen@lemmy.world
    2·
    2 months ago

    I do the research and script writing for a documentary company. In 2023, I noticed that the pages of serial killers I’d been researching, started mentioning political affiliation in the top paragraph… but they all said Democrat (or socialst, communist sympathizer, anti-fascist, etc). Then, one of the murderers I was researching, who was literally a Republican politician who killed his wife , said Democrat and I had a team investigate. It got corrected, but we have no idea if it was one person or a group that changed the pages. Someone out there wants murderers to be associated with democrats.

        • M137@lemmy.world
          1·
          2 months ago

          I seriously don’t understand this kind of reaction to being corrected about mistakes. All it does is show everyone that you’re even dumber than previously shown via the mistake and makes it obvious you don’t care to learn anything from it so you’ll continue being just as dumb.
          Learn from it instead and thank them for teaching you something.
          But you’re clearly not mentally grown and/or smart enough to not react like a 5-year-old to someone pointing out you’ve made a mistake. And it’s hilarious that you don’t realize how childish and dumb you make it clear you are by this kind of reaction and choosing to show it with a reply.

    • PhilipTheBucket@ponder.catOP
      1·
      2 months ago

      Yeah, I was trying to talk about the situation without specifically linking to the comments or starting any kind of brigade situation. I figured being vague was better than being inflammatory, and anyone who cared enough would know what I was taking about, which seems to be accurate.

  • FundMECFS@lemmy.blahaj.zone
    1·
    2 months ago

    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.

    • lunarul@lemmy.world
      0·
      2 months ago

      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.

  • douglasg14b@lemmy.world
    1·
    2 months ago

    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.

    • kava@lemmy.world
      1·
      2 months ago

      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.

      • douglasg14b@lemmy.world
        1·
        2 months ago

        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.

  • Supervisor194@lemmy.world
    1·
    2 months ago

    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.

    • PhilipTheBucket@ponder.catOP
      2·
      2 months ago

      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.

      • ricecake@sh.itjust.works
        1·
        2 months ago

        They don’t actually hate Wikipedia. They hold that it’s not a primary source for things that require citation, and that it’s not a great textbook.

        Reading the Wikipedia page for optics is a bad way to learn optics.
        It’s also difficult to cite as a source because you can’t actually specify who you’re citing, which is why Wikipedia, for research purposes, is a great way to get a quality overview and the terms you need, and then jump to its sources for more context and primary sources as you need them.

        Encyclopedias in general are overviews or summaries of what they reference. Teachers would typically like you to reference something that isn’t a summary or overview when writing one, sincenthat what most of those reports are.

    • UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.worldEnglish
      0·
      2 months ago

      Who hates Wikipedia:

      Russia

      Is this even true? Has any Russian state official or organization indicated they give two shits about an English-centric US-hosted online encyclopedia? Ditto Israel.

      Feels like every time I read a “bad actors on the internet” story, I get someone in the comments insisting a foreign intelligence officer is secretly pulling all the strings. As though American propagandists and industrial scale media magnets aren’t willing or capable of doing the job themselves.

  • RightHandOfIkaros@lemmy.worldEnglish
    0·
    2 months ago

    I don’t know exactly what is going on with WikiPedia right this moment, mostly because I am neither glued to the news nor to WikiPedia, and I have no idea who this user you talk about is or what they are saying. However, WikiPedia isnt exactly a 100% trustworthy source, and it never really was.

    Calling WikiPedia a “force for truth” is kind of silly, in my opinion. It can be helpful with basic information or finding potential sources, but it is definitely not something you should just immediately take everything on the site at face value. Within the last maybe 10 years or so, the credibility of its sources have started to come into question, at least on some of their recently authored/edited articles. It certainly doesnt help that literally anyone can edit most pages, and that WikiPedia is not a verifiably neutral information source on most things. What I mean by this is that, WikiPedia might list both positive and negative reception about a certain film or video game, for example, but they usually wont mention whether the negative points are outliers or whether there is overwhelmingly more positive reception except if there is a controversy section. This gives a surface appearance of being neutral, but actually skews toward whichever side is the dissenting opinion. For video games and film, they at least list reviews which can kind of mitigate this, but on articles regarding history or art, you cant exactly put reviews on historian/artist opinions. This can lead (and has lead) to some instances of sources quoting themselves (which I think is against WikiPedia rules?) and other hilarity.

    • GHiLA@sh.itjust.works
      1·
      2 months ago

      All those words… not one article of falsehood to back it up with.

      You are allowed to freely link wikipedia here, and post screenshots.

      Go ahead. Hit us with some examples. You likely have plenty of pages in mind already, so this shouldn’t take long.

      I hear a lotta hearsay…

    • stinky@redlemmy.comEnglish
      0·
      2 months ago

      It brings tons of information to the masses, all over the world, in every language, for free, without ads. Shut the fuck up.

      • RightHandOfIkaros@lemmy.worldEnglish
        0·
        2 months ago

        Yes it does. But not all of that information is always true. Wikipedia pages are vandalized all the time, people quote sources that are later revealed as made up or not credible, these are all things that happen everywhere, WikiPedia is not immune to this. That is why I said WikiPedia is not a “force for truth.” It can be correct, but can you guarantee that every time you go to WikiPedia, the information on any given page will always be 100% correct? This is all I meant.

        • BlackRoseAmongThorns@slrpnk.net
          0·
          2 months ago

          i would call being resistant to misinformation, being a force against misinformation, is that enough to warrant calling it a force for truth?

          They do it for free, too, what more you can ask for? Well you can unreasonably ask them, these people, humans, fallible biological machines, to “be” correct 100% of the time, even when moderators may not be available, even when people didn’t yet report misinfo, something you’d never ask anyone else to do or be.

          Oh wait you did ask that, so I think there’s a very good reason to believe you don’t really care for what you preach.

          • RightHandOfIkaros@lemmy.worldEnglish
            01·
            2 months ago

            Do you ever go back to a WikiPedia article after you read it to check if it has been updated? Yeah, didn’t think so. Most people don’t. Thats why there is danger in just believing everything on WikiPedia because its on there and its free. Its not a bad resource, but it isn’t always a good source either.

            But obviously you and others have some weird fetish regarding WikiPedia, so I guess this is where the conversation stops. People here be making it out like I am saying WikiPedia is evil and that is definitely not what I am saying, but I suppose on Lemmy it doesn’t really matter. People believe whatever they want to regardless.

  • sunzu2@thebrainbin.org
    0·
    2 months ago

    That’s a one issue account just report him and leave comments calling out the behavior.

    The issue will fix it self.

    • PhilipTheBucket@ponder.catOP
      1·
      2 months ago

      I don’t think it will, though. I’ve reported the misinformation, and it’s still up as of right now.

      I honestly am not even sure that mods should be in the habit of deciding that things are “probably” misinformation and removing them. In practice, they are not in that habit, so it’s not a solution. And even if they were, I certainly don’t think that the whole topic should be banned for discussion among the rest of us.

  • BMTea@lemmy.world
    0·
    2 months ago

    “PSA I reported an account because they have bad arguments in my opinion” seems like a terrible precedent of a post for this sub. Why are people upvoting this junk.

  • socsa@piefed.socialEnglish
    0·
    2 months ago

    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.

    • Phoenixz@lemmy.ca
      0·
      2 months ago

      Yeah horseshoe theory is an actual thing and it shows hard here on Lemmy. Same lies, same taxticts, different extremists.

        • Trainguyrom@reddthat.comEnglish
          1·
          2 months ago

          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

        • Phoenixz@lemmy.ca
          01·
          2 months ago

          Yeah that’s just horseshoe theory with extra steps and gymnastics to be able to say that far left is okay, really, they never do anything wrong, trust me!

          Unless they do as tankies ARE the far left

          • PhilipTheBucket@ponder.catOP
            1·
            2 months ago

            It’s not any kind of judgment about right or wrong. It’s just an observation that some nutty behaviors like kicking someone out of your web forum the instant they dissent in any way, or openly defending your chosen government even when it’s killing people like they’re spraying for weeds in the garden, are unique to far-right individuals and tankies, and unknown and abhorred pretty much everywhere else.

              • Diva (she/her)@lemmy.ml
                2·
                2 months ago

                ‘people who disagree with me are all the same, banning people for dissent on a hair trigger’

                looks at moderation history CW: bigotry

                spoiler

                Charming.

                in b4 ‘it was only tactical bigotry’: still bigotry

                Hard to fault any of the bans/removals I see here, looks like centrist extremists are capable of being toxic AF too

            • Phoenixz@lemmy.ca
              12·
              2 months ago

              You disagree with me? Then you dont know as much about this subject as I do because if you did, you’d agree with me

              Thank you for making my point for me