Disinformation campaigns aren’t just about spreading the wrong info, but also about sowing discord. A quick statement about civility on this topic, and the best way to handle these accounts.

If you’ve been in this sub for just a few months because of the Grusch stuff, or even if you’ve been in it for years, all the way back to the days of the 4Chan alien selfie fiasco or even further back than that, you’ve probably seen that this sub is honestly pretty chill and people often keep a level head.

The past ~week since this airliner video was posted had probably been the most toxic I’ve ever seen it. People have been insulting people and calling them loons, making comments about others needing to take the “tinfoil hat” off, or just calling them idiots, dumbasses, etc. for believe the video is genuine, and on the flip side people are accusing users left and right if being disinformation agents because they aren’t convinced about the video.

We get trolls coming in and using aggressive and inflammatory language to argue both sides of the argument and getting everyone riled up, and then we get an influx of bots that are clearly just AI responding to the comments or even stealing a full comment word for word and spamming it as responses to others in the thread. We need to be more discerning about this, because while it looks like we are catching some now, clearly to a degree this campaign has worked with how well it has gotten us to get at each other’s throats.

If you find a comment or account that you think is a troll/bot, just downvote it and don’t engage whatsoever. Just report it to the mods and leave it alone. If we don’t engage with them, then they can’t continue to sow discord and spread misinformation(whatever that may be).