Palantir may be engaging in a coordinated disinformation campaign by astroturfing these news-related subreddits: r/world, r/newsletter, r/investinq, and r/tech_news
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According to the comments r/europe_sub and r/canada_sub might be involved as well.
I mean, obviously Reddit is full of astroturfing and psyops, remember when all of sudden everyone on that bloody website was a die-hard zionist when the week before most americans could not have placed Israel on a map
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Right, humans are bad about that kind of thing. I think it has to do with Dunbar's number? The monkeysphere? It's hard for us to model a lot of people as full people in our head, especially as they're more removed from us.
Like you probably don't really think about the garbage man as a fully fleshed out guy with hopes, dreams, a favorite band, a love that got away, and all that. When you have some absolutely rancid trash, you probably just throw it in the can and forget about it. But if it was your mother or best friend that was going to have to deal with it, maybe you'd be more careful. Wouldn't want the bag to rip and spray maggots all over Mom.
That's fine. That's all of us.
But I think there's degrees. Shades. Like you mentioned cell phones. Most of us accept the out of sight horrors that go with them. But, like, some people are absolute assholes to wait staff. Just treat the waiter like shit, are rude to the coffee shop people, whatever. I think most of us recognize that as bad.
Somewhere between those two points I think is "I'm going to build software to spy on people". Personally, I think that should be ok the far side of the line. The not okay side. Why? A bit of self preservation, a bit of ethics, and a helping of "I don't want to contribute to bad things happening to people, even ones I don't know".
This post is getting long. I think you're right that it's not as simple as "doesn't care about other people" but I think that's a factor.
Absolutely a nuanced area. But on top of not modelling random people as full individuals it's hard to determine what spying on people might actually mean. I don't really want to defend working for a company as nefarious as Palantir - even if I honestly hardly knew them before Trump #2 - but convincing yourself that gathering people's data isn't problematic is quite easy, and we all inherently accept a wide array of surveillance measures as - willing or unwilling - members of state entities, be it a video camera in a clothing store or governments logging our tax data. Then comes the fact that employees below the level of "board of directors" usually don't know everything going on in the company; I wouldn't fault a junior dev choosing to work for, say, 'cool' Google or Apple in 2017.
Of course it's relevant that humans are egocentrical animals; I wouldn't give my own life to save five people that I don't know in Moldova. Being too empathetic is a poor trait in a dog eat dog world. Of course we need standards and to hold others up to these standards; I don't know your friend, what he does at Palantir or when he started working there - maybe he's a lazy ass that holds them back haha - and I do think, especially with all that's transpired the past 5 months, that it's a problematic company to be part of - I just wanted to discuss that I don't think it's just lack of empathy
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I have never seen it but I remember the snake meme was a highlight of the time
I'm referring to Avatar!
I cannot believe they blew that kind of money and produced that piece of turd lol
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Good evidence of astroturfing on Reddit. That Reddit took action and banned the Palantir agents only provides evidence that exposure of the op is the problem. Not evidence that Reddit acts in good faith.
A good question to ask, is what would happen if Lemmy was the victim of astroturfing. It's decentralized for starters and groups might not even reside in the same place on the fediverse. Also I expect Reddit has monitoring, analytics and tools that could flag behaviour rather than somebody having to go through logs trying to find patterns.
I think Lemmy and other federated platforms have escaped having to deal with these issues simply because someone attempting to astroturf will do it on the biggest platform. So Lemmy escapes not by any technical or administrative virtue but by being smallfry.
Corporatism leads to imperialism by the need to seek profits in new markets. Wherever we see lots of defense of imperialism, there is corporate backing behind it. That's why I think lemmy.world is astroturfed. There's a strong anti-communist and pro "free market" capitalist tendency on there. Posts that attack the Global South as the world's villains. On the other hand, there are also many people on lemmy.world that speak out against imperialism and capitalistic exploitation. But the recurrent waves of reactionary politics on lemmy.world indicate to me the presence of astroturfing trolls.
This makes sense even on a relatively small platform like Lemmy because it threatens to become a nucleus for organizing against capitalism. -
Setting aside the veritable TITAN-loads of shady shit Palsntir is up to, it's also worth noting that Reddit's policy changes have made it clear that providing a platform for the spread of disinformation is a central part of its current business model, so I'd assume that not only is Palantir using it for that purpose, but that they are far from alone.
What shady stuff are you talking about may I ask?
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Palantir is pretty awful. I knew a guy who took a job there, a bunch of years ago. When he said where he was going, I asked "But what if they work on something really shitty? Like spying on people?". He was like, "Meh", with a big shrug.
He was friendly and kind to the people around him, but I guess he just didn't care about anyone he didn't know personally right now.
If I'm reading this right, you would basically say that any company that helps government institutions spy on people is awful, is that right?
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Yup. I've worked in tech for nearly 20 years. Most people who work in tech don't give a shit about the ethics of what they do or where they work if the money is good.
This is a screenshot from one of the discords of current and/or previous coworkers, but the sentiment is everywhere
Ex pal people are on slack, not discord. This is probably an investor server
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Palantir
maybe engaging in a coordinated disinformation campaignIs, has been, is designed to, whole purpose is, etc... definitely not "may"...
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Source? I've never heard about pal being used for disinformation
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Ex pal people are on slack, not discord. This is probably an investor server
Lol are you telling me that the people that I've worked with directly in small 5-10 person discord servers that we set up when I worked with them, are in fact investor imposters, and instead the actual coworkers are secretly using separate slack setups? Or do you just imagine that anecdotally how ever your coworkers have communicated is how all people communicate without exception?
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Palantir just partnered with TeleTracking. For anyone outside of health care, TeleTracking is a health tech company that's been on decline for awhile.
Why is this relevant, you may ask? TeleTracking still has a lot of clients, many of which are smaller hospitals grandfathered into older, cheaper contracts. If you go to a hospital that uses TeleTracking, Palantir now has all your patient health information.
Is there any evidence that Palantir the company aggregates data across contractual boundaries? Everything I've seen indicates the reverse: it's a glorified hosted data storage solution with workflows built on top
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Palantir is the absolute scum of the information world. Tech with promise, but used in the worst kind of ways.
What kind of ways, can you explain?
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Good evidence of astroturfing on Reddit. That Reddit took action and banned the Palantir agents only provides evidence that exposure of the op is the problem. Not evidence that Reddit acts in good faith.
Put me in my place if this is nonsense but doesn't it make way more sense if the astroturfing is done by WSB goons? I just don't see corporate entities coordinating this kind of thing
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Who cares? Anyone still drinking the reddit cool aid is just asking for a leopard to eat their face.
I think we should all care about what misinformation is spread to what people
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What kind of ways, can you explain?
3 light reading articles. Enjoy.
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If I'm reading this right, you would basically say that any company that helps government institutions spy on people is awful, is that right?
I haven't thought through all the scenarios and edge cases, but generally spying on the public seems dicey and ripe for abuse. Especially if it's just like "the public, all the time, whenever we feel like it," instead of "ok we got a warrant signed by a judge to investigate Joe Bombguy".
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I think we should all care about what misinformation is spread to what people
Reddit is a lost cause. I check anything coming from there because I suspect its fake or distorted.
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I haven't thought through all the scenarios and edge cases, but generally spying on the public seems dicey and ripe for abuse. Especially if it's just like "the public, all the time, whenever we feel like it," instead of "ok we got a warrant signed by a judge to investigate Joe Bombguy".
To me, spying and spying on the public en masse are very different things
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Put me in my place if this is nonsense but doesn't it make way more sense if the astroturfing is done by WSB goons? I just don't see corporate entities coordinating this kind of thing
The top hits for my "WSB" search are:
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World Sports Betting
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r/WallStreetBets
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World Superbikes
I don't think any of their goons are astroturfing (well, maybe World Superbikes). Did you mean a different entity?
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