• NateNate60@lemmy.world
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      3 months ago

      This is just simplistic and un-nuanced thinking.

      The use of bots is not to generate new opinions, it is to make fringe opinions seem more popular than they are. Most (but not all) opinions propagated this way are already worthy of dismissal for other reasons, but when it’s clear that someone is repeating word-for-word a line of dismissable or unsound rhetoric which is also being propagated by those bots, it lends itself to three reasonable conclusions:

      1. This person genuinely believes that and was not influenced by the bots to do so, i.e. it is a coincidence
      2. This person genuinely believes that but only because they were stupid enough to get absorbed by the bots
      3. This person does not genuinely believe that and is acting in bad faith

      Only in case 1 is such an opinion worth discussing, but the vast majority of cases will be case 2 or case 3.

      That is why it is reasonable to dismiss such opinions despite the possibility that they are genuine, in good faith, and not the product of propaganda. Because the odds that they’re not are vastly greater. Nobody can be certain of anyone’s intentions on the Internet, so rational actors can only play a game of “What is the most likely scenario?”.

      • Amerikan Pharaoh@lemmygrad.ml
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        3 months ago

        and not the product of propaganda.

        If any of the collective you actually believed this we wouldn’t have half the arguments we do with ledditors like you because you’d have examined your own biases borne of Western propaganda by now. This… Idle sophistry, to be as polite about it as I physically can about it, doesn’t pass the smell test.

      • KⒶMⒶLⒶ WⒶLZ 2Ⓐ24@lemmy.world
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        3 months ago

        Nobody can be certain of anyone’s intentions on the Internet,

        except you, apparently, who is certain they can tell a good faith actor from a bad faith actor based solely on whether they have an opinion you have seen or one you agree with

        • NateNate60@lemmy.world
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          3 months ago

          No, of course, I cannot. I do not judge what category someone likely falls into based on whether what they say matches nearly word for word a “promoted” viewpoint. In some cases, I mostly agree with what they said but it’s painfully obvious that person didn’t come to that conclusion through their own thinking but is rather just parroting a screenshot of a post on the site formerly known as Twitter.

          You have missed the entire point of my comment. If someone is likely to be in categories 2 or 3, I dismiss them if the viewpoint is otherwise not worthy of discussion, which it usually is not. I don’t care if this causes me to misjudge the intentions of some people, because that is inevitable in any probability-based judgement system. What matters is picking what is most likely correct.

          I don’t feel that you have the ability to grasp this point and you’re just going to come up with another argument I didn’t make to attack.

        • NateNate60@lemmy.world
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          3 months ago

          No, I am not. I wouldn’t say it if it were made up. Who have I got to convince by making shit up? I am not pushing any viewpoint at all.

          I base my assertion on interactions with people on this platform. Whenever someone parrots a point that is promoted this way, they’re almost universally just repeating what some wisecrack said on X that sounds correct enough to not investigate further or think critically about and is agreeable to their worldview.

          I will not argue over this. You either accept what I am saying or you don’t, but I don’t give enough of a shit either way to get into an argument.