“According to FEC filings, the Synapse Group has worked for Republican Governor Doug Burgum of North Dakota, who ran for the GOP presidential nomination this cycle, as well as GOP candidates for Congress. Synapse has also been paid hundreds of thousands of dollars for field and canvassing work by America PAC, the outside spending group started by allies of Musk that has spent millions of dollars this election cycle to boost Trump and oppose Democrats.”
Oh, I saw the numbers! That was terrific that you pulled that together!
And yeah, their history shows that they’re either chronically and desperately online (sort of sad actually) or posting like they’re getting paid for it. I don’t envy the mods for having to deal with all the chaos that user causes, but the user is almost preternaturally good at threading the needle of the rules.
Luckily the election will be done in less than two months and then I have to guess we won’t seem them again for another four years ;)
Lol they just banned me from their super legitimate “socialism” community because they wanted to keep tabs on me but not be countered in public as much.
Ha! Congrats! <fist bump>
Yeah I agree with all of this. I do think it’s a shame though that the rules are all they will go on. There ought to be some algorithm for determining likelihood of trolling. This dude would definitely be way over the threshold of any such algorithm that was worth a damn.
With all the news about the Russian campaign with influencers, I had to wonder if the Feds are even aware enough of the Fediverse to even begin to look at what’s happening here. We certainly know state sponsored misinformation campaigns are active and in place and targeting folks who are disaffected for a variety of reasons, so if Russia and China had networks specifically targeting various corners of the Fediverse, I wouldn’t be surprised at all. Theoretically we’re a much richer ground for them than corpo-sponsored sites filled with normies (which we now have proof they’re already active with).
In an election where the margin of victory in some states will be on the scale of a few thousand (or maybe even hundreds), it would seem a likely strategy.
Yeah I definitely think you are onto something. The audience is much smaller but the advantage is that a lot of people here really are so left they despise Democrats and would probably be easier to convince not to vote than your typical Democratic voter. Trolling campaigns here would have a much more concentrated target audience. They already know they don’t need to convince conservatives on mainstream social media.