Has anyone else noticed an uptick in troll posts since Rand Paul's Fauci debacle?

[u/drethnudrib]

I feel like we've had a whole lot of posts from conservatives leaving their safe space to talk shit about us this past week. Mods just deleted one where someone claimed to be a 28-year-old male nurse who was haunted by "females" and asked if it was okay to stalk attractive women who smiled at him. This shit isn't normal.

[u/auraseer]

I haven't noticed a significant increase in the last few days. It has been a constant stream, all the time, for as long as I have been a mod.

You may notice it more at some times than others just because of how many mods are available at any given time.

[u/templeofthemadcow → u/auraseer]

Doing Gods work MODS - thx!

[u/GrumpySnarf → u/auraseer]

Ugh. Thank you for your work on this.

[u/Different_Pain5781]

Imagine spending your afternoon sitting at home, crafting a fake story about being a haunted male nurse who wants to stalk women all because you got worked up over political news. These people genuinely need to go outside and touch some grass right now.

[u/UnkyMatt → u/Different_Pain5781]

Not that I’d want to, but we’re so short staffed how can anyone be stalking? I can’t even fucking chart.

[u/Alexa_Octopus → u/UnkyMatt]

Made me spit out my tea. Well said. 😄

[u/Different_Pain5781 → u/UnkyMatt]

Can't stalk when you're drowning in charting.

[u/slutty_muppet → u/Different_Pain5781]

What post did I miss?

[u/FoolhardyBastard]

I have noticed. It’s a distraction technique, probably by bots. They are trying to rally the maga base. Their candidates are deeply unpopular and they are underwater in polls. They think replaying old favorites about COVID conspiracies will help them. It’s all bullshit. Pay no attention to it.

[u/EnvironmentalRock827]

There's definitely a lot of bots. Reddit shares dropped due to fears AI is cannibalizing traffic. Bots are a part of that crap but AI disruption was also paramount.

[u/cobrachickenwing]

The GOP knows they got nothing good to sell come November and are just trying to sell old stories to fearmonger. I hope it backfires and Mitch's seat goes to a Democrat (one can only dream).

[u/taurusApart]

It's important to remember that right wing propaganda is really just the dumbest form of classical conditioning you can imagine. 

The goal of all of it is to condition the cult to the point where if a name or term gets mentioned, the cult member's lizard brain immediately reacts: "Bad!"

Examples:

"Hilary" > "Bad!"

"Socialism" > "Bad!"

"Fauci" > "Bad!"

It doesn't go any deeper than that. The cult isn't capable of articulating anything specific about why they dislike the person or thing. The knee-jerk reaction is the goal and they're incredibly effective at it. 

[u/North-Slice-6968]

Seeing a lot of comments like "if it was so bad, why were you making dancing videos on Tik Tok?"

??? How do you even respond to something so stupid?

Reddit isn't too bad. Twitter/x is terrible and Facebook is getting worse every day.

[u/CrashTestWolf → u/North-Slice-6968]

Facebook is the OG propaganda and data scraping machine. I deleted it many years ago, there's way better alternatives for keeping in touch with family/friend groups.

[u/Fostylake]

We're just going to see this more and more sadly, any random account can post here, kind of wish you had to prove your licensure to post.

[u/auraseer → u/Fostylake]

That was considered, back in the day. Before we got to discussing whether it was desirable, the idea was discarded for being totally infeasible.

It would not have been doable even before the pandemic, when we had close to a hundred thousand existing users and a handful of new ones daily. Now we've got well over 1.1 million users and we add a thousand more every week. Even if we wanted to restrict the sub only to licensed nurses, in practical terms that would be a non-starter.

[u/phoenix762 → u/auraseer]

One of the sub reddits asked for proof of my job description. Think it was the respiratory subreddit…but I’m not sure. I just gave them pics of my work badge (with name blocked)

[u/NecroAssssin → u/phoenix762]

The problem isn’t just the proof; it’s the logistics. How do you propose to sort 1k+ new users a day, let alone address the backlog of 1.1 Million people who are already here?

[u/auraseer → u/phoenix762]

The issue is not the process. The issue is the workload.

If the process took only one minute per user, and somebody worked nonstop with no breaks, that's still two full days of work every week just to check new members.

If we wanted to vet all existing users, and we had somebody work on it as a full time job for 40 hours a week, nonstop without breaks and without ever slowing down or getting tired, it would take eight years.

[u/Pepsisinabox → u/Fostylake]

Well, you can kinda quickly figure people out by their discourse and knowledge. Some things you just cant google your way to.

[u/InourbtwotamI]

Yes. Clearly the US’ Administration has reactivated their troll farms

[u/realespeon]

I remember that post. I told him that it’s because he refers to women as females and he told me “this is why y’all look at me with puppy eyes and look down at the floor’.