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
You should just report, block, and move on. If someone is a regular offender, their instance admin can just ban them. If they operate their own instance, they can be defederated.
It’s good to identify bad actors, but there’s no shortage of people with dumb opinions (even on Lemmy), and pointing them out like this only gives them more attention—exactly the kind of thing they want.
Blocking shields you from seeing their comments. But others will still see them. You’ll be unable to call them out the second time they lie if you do it like that. Which is fair enough if that’s what you wanna do, but it’s not a solution to the current issue that op is describing.
And that’s why reporting is such an important step that we should all be doing. That’s why I mentioned it first. Blocking is for your benefit, but it’s not strictly necessary, and the spirit of my comment is to let the admins handle it without giving them engagement or more exposure.
So you can be a vigilante if you want, but with the number of people out there who have dumb opinions, it seems like a waste of time to try to play admin without actual admin powers.
Fuck that approach. It just shields trolls and other bad actors from consequence
Notice how I said “report” as the first action. If you want to keep seeing their bullshit, that’s your business, but the Fediverse works by not giving those people an audience.
If you want to be their own personal poltergeist, haunting their every comment, that’s your choice, but I would never recommend anyone waste their sanity and emotions on a bad actor here on Lemmy any more than they have to.
If literally everyone did what you recommend, that would be a feasible approach. But for various reasons that’s obviously not gonna happen. What does happen when people try that is the troll continues to shit up the community for everyone else and a few people reporting them once sometimes does next to nothing. Hence you get someone like linkerbaan or universalmonk shitting in the pool for months without consequence. If you don’t block them, you can continue to report them and/or call them out, which leads to shit actually happening.
Like I said, “reporting” is the thing people should be doing first. But OP is so bothered by whatever person’s bullshit that they felt the need to make a PSA about it, and that to me says they need to just block and move on with their life. I would give the same recommendation to other people who are getting fixated on individual bad actors.
Trolls don’t deserve to live in your head rent-free.
The first step to solving any problem that takes cooperation to solve is raising awareness. A single report from a person here and there is not that.
I think you’re more hung up up on analyzing the psychology of those trying to raise that awareness. You may not be reading them accurately, but even if you are I don’t see that mattering very much. It’s not your call what is mentally healthy for everyone else.
Couldn’t agree more.
Then why are you trying to be cute and not call out the username (or usernames if they are using alts)? This doesn’t identify jack, just says that someone exists doing something nonspecifically bad towards wikipedia.
As important as Wikipedia is, there are a ton of legitimate problems with the site and community moderators. Some of the drama that comes out of there is downright otherworldly. Without examples it’s hard to take what you’re saying seriously.
Edit: Either there’s enough direct screenshotted evidence that this needs to be a specific call for admins to ban this person, or this just comes across as absurd escalation of some stupid internet debate.
Second edit: it’s wikipediasuckscoop
Do we really need a warning for someone so obviously biased? Next you’ll be warning us that madthumbs might have some reservations about the usefulness of linux.
I think it’s useful to talk about. I’m not sure why so many people are coming out lecturing me that this should be a forbidden topic for discussion.
I’m not getting that from the responses. What I’ve seen is
These all seem to reiterate the idea that “this is not a good post” and not “this subject is taboo”.
But, if you’re messing this up, does that jeopardize your own efforts?
I’ve literally seen no one say that it’s forbidden. Maybe one of the comment chains from someone I already have blocked does, but there’s only
fourtwo of those.I see plenty of people saying this is a stupid post. A post that is uselessly vague. A post that is almost entirely purposeless.
I understand wanting to avoid brigading, but as it stands this post amounts to “You all should know that I reported someone (I won’t say who, tee hee) for posting something that I think is misinformation about Wikipedia (I won’t say what, tee hee). It’s really bad, but you’ll just have to take my word for it. This person I won’t name is just the worst. You need to know they’re the worst. But you don’t need to know who they are or what they said, that’s not important! Also I have vague consipiratorial feelings about anyone who would speak ill of Wikipedia after Musk said bad things about it, because no one could possibly have grievances or concerns with Wikipedia that are still valid despite Musk’s derangement.”
If you wanted to spread awareness, you should have named the problem user. If you wanted to force the admins into action you should have named the problem user.
If you are willing to give the admins time to handle things properly, especially during the fucking holidays where they likely have other things to do, instead of needlessly raising an alarm on something pitifully small… then you should have waited a few days for them to do something before running off to play vigilante with this post.
If you want to make people waste time trying to evaluate if you’re a nutter, thin skinned, or otherwise blowing smoke… you make a post like this one.
Either you had enough evidence to make this warning/call out post legitimately, and then you make it with names, screenshots, and fucking receipts… or you give admins time to respond and sit until they show they won’t do something.
This weak, vague post just says that you’re too impatient to let the admins work, you don’t trust them to do what you think is the right thing, but you’re also chickenshit that they might ban you for talking about it. Rather than post this from a throwaway made on another instance you make this useless thing.
TL;DR- People are telling you that this attempt to “warn” people is worthless without actionable info.
6 different people have reported my post, so presumably they think it should be forbidden, at least.
Hundreds of people have upvoted this post, so presumably they think it’s a worthwhile post. You are welcome to your opinion that it isn’t, of course.
OP doesn’t identify bad actors. They say bad actors exist which is next to useless