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A comment on We can have democracy or we can have Facebook. Parent comment

Re:We can have democracy or we can have Facebook by mnd999 on Friday December 11, 2020 @06:56AM (#25384743)
IMHO trolling is bad by definition.

But it doesn’t really matter whether you consider it the goodies or baddies, it’s still a form of shutting down speech.

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Re:We can have democracy or we can have Facebook by eptcyka on Friday December 11, 2020 @07:29AM (#25384997)
Are you implying that the deplorable people on twitter are not outnumbered by the non-deplorable people because of bot farms?
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Re:We can have democracy or we can have Facebook by MagnumOpus on Friday December 11, 2020 @10:46AM (#25386992)
There needs to be nuance around "outnumbered".

The deplorables are made more visible and made to appear more popular by bot-assisted upvoting/retweeting/sharing efforts.

Non-deplorables are silenced or made to self-censor by mass-downvotes/death threats in DMs/doxxing. And even the ones who just view and don't write get disheartened and leave if their curated frontpage is a cesspool of falsehoods and outrage bait. So yes, bot farms and their manual brethren (wumao dang, IRA, alt-right discords) over time help to purge dissenting voices.

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