#Alignment Systems

[ribstongrowback]

Of Law, Chaos, and that Dumbass Chart

people who try to "fix" the alginment chart in order to make it more truthful to the human experience in various ways make a fundamental mistake in understanding what purposes it serves within the medium it originates from

at the very start, it is useful to think of alignment as team jerseys, as i've said in the past. from a gameplay and storytelling perspective, this needs to be somewhat restrictive to create interesting interactions with a game system

in game, knowing someone's alignment provides some context as to whether or not you might be aligned with them, but mostly it allows to create many alignment-specific abilities, such as spells against specific creatures, for example.

this system is by no means perfect, but by being restrictive it allows for a very interesting amount of creativity within its boundaries. this should be stimulating, even, to you. you make a character that is chaotic.

this is by no means to say that the dnd alignment chart is good or even decent, it sucks ass, but it sucks ass because it fails at the things it would otherwise facilitate.

if you wish to include a similar system in your games, in your fiction, do keep in mind the purposes alignment may serve within your creation, how useful it might be, and do make it fraught. Make it flawed and unstable and reflective of a wider cosmogony that kinda sucks as long as it sucks in interesting ways.

as an example, recently i've been thinking about homebrewing a 40k campaign with a reskin of one of my own systems, as a style exercise, and i've been thinking about corruption. and i thought, i don't want a gauge. that's boring. instead, at the end of sesh you gotta do a lil "where's your character at mentally" by picking what emotion they feel most strongly between fury, pride, love, hope or faith.

each of these having a tracker, whenever ones gets too high compared to faith you'll be CORRUPTED and RUINED and start mutating or something.

this, of course, is nonsense. it's not bad to be madder at injustice than you are a simp for the god emperor of mankind. but this ideological framework does say something, while also carrying consequences in game

never forget: tabletop rpgs are not just for telling stories, they are, at the end of the day, still games.

[dollbotthing]

many of you on here agree with alignment systems that force people into categories based on things we have no control over. if you called someone with adhd “chaotic” or whatever, you are a jerk okay. this is why we can’t have nice things

[bafco-reliability]

Straightness Laser Alignment Systems in Al Khobar: Precision for Structural Stability

In Al Khobar, Straightness Laser Alignment Systems in Al Khobar are essential for industries that require precise alignment over extended distances. These systems are ideal for applications where long, straight alignments are necessary, such as in large-scale manufacturing and construction.

The Straightness Laser Alignment Systems in Al Khobar provide real-time feedback, allowing technicians to adjust machinery or structures with high accuracy. This ensures that equipment operates smoothly and reduces the potential for misalignment-related issues.

Advantages of Straightness Laser Alignment Systems:

Accurate Alignment Over Long Distances: Ideal for large-scale projects that require precise, straight alignment.

Increased Safety: Reduces the risk of equipment failure due to misalignment.

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Straightness Laser Alignment Systems in Al Khobar are invaluable for industries seeking accuracy and stability in large-scale industrial applications.

Discover more on our website! 🌐✨ https://bafco-reliability.com/

[detailedart]

Mars, Jupiter, Venus, Saturn, 25.01.25, by Manusia dan Langit (composite picture of the alignment also called “planet parade”)

[poorly-drawn-mdzs]

At your side [End of Season 2]

[First] Prev <–-> Next

[theofficialastronomy101]

All Planets perfectly aligned the other night!

[comicaurora]

Funnily enough I know about Elric from my dad’s copy of Deities and Demigods. Yes, he has one of the old ones that has Cthulhu in it too.

every time D&D starts trying to tighten the screws on their licensing and make everyone pay them rent for the privilege of using their game I fondly remember all the blatant theft that D&D proudly laid its foundations on

[aeniith]

Someone in the comments was asking for sources on ergativity and antipassives.

Here are sources that concern both:

Polinsky, Maria. "Antipassive." The Oxford Handbook of Ergativity, edited by Jessica Coon, Diane Massam, and Lisa deMena Travis, Oxford University Press, 2017. Polinsky, Maria. "Antipassives in Crosslinguistic Perspective." Annual Review of Linguistics, vol. 6, 2020, pp. 173–193.

Janic, Katarzyna. "On the Reflexive-Antipassive Polysemy: Typological Convergence from Unrelated Languages." Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Berkeley Linguistics Society, vol. 37, no. 1, 2011, pp. 217–232.

Bittner, Maria, and Ken Hale. "Ergativity: Toward a Theory of a Heterogeneous Class." Linguistic Inquiry, vol. 27, no. 4, 1996, pp. 531–604.

Here are a few sources on just ergativity:

Deal, Amy Rose. (2015). "Ergativity." In Syntax - Theory and Analysis: An International Handbook, edited by Tibor Kiss and Artemis Alexiadou, 654–707. De Gruyter Mouton.

Coon, Jessica, Diane Massam, and Lisa deMena Travis, eds. (2017). The Oxford Handbook of Ergativity. Oxford University Press.

Dixon, R. M. W. (1979). "Ergativity." Language, 55(1), 59–138.

Aldridge, Edith. (2008). "Generative Approaches to Ergativity." Language and Linguistics Compass, 2(5), 966–995.

And some on antipassives in particular:

Sansom, Meagan. "Where Do Antipassive Constructions Come From?" Diachronica, vol. 34, no. 2, 2017, pp. 233–276.

Cooreman, Ann. "A Functional Typology of Antipassives." In Voice: Form and Function, edited by Barbara A. Fox and Paul J. Hopper, John Benjamins, 1994, pp. 49–88. Also, I want to draw attention to the work of my colleague from graduate school, Raina Heaten, whose dissertation is about the typology of antipassives: Heaton, R. L. (2017). A typology of antipassives, with special reference to Mayan (Doctoral dissertation, University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa). University of Hawai‘i ScholarSpace.

This translation involves the use of the antipassive. You probably know what a passive voice is. But have you heard of the antipassive?

A passive essentially takes an object of a clause and makes it a subject, for a variety of reasons, including moving the focus, eliminating the need to explicitly state what would be the subject of the active voice version of the clause. So “Namí ate the apricot” would become “The apricot was eaten (by Namí)”

The antipassive essentially does the opposite. It takes a transitive verbal phrase and makes the *object* either disappear or demotes it to an oblique role. So what is necessarily a transitive verb otherwise, like “scare”, becomes intransitive. So it’s a little like saying “Namí has been scaring”. Only in English, that’s not really a good clause, so I translate it as “Namí has been scaring people”. With this indeterminate word, “people”, it doesn’t really matter WHO Namí has been scaring, it’s anyone and everyone who goes down by the river, potentially. The point is Namí and the fact that she’s acting weird.

Languages that have an ergative-absolutive verbal alignment are particular likely to use antipassives. This is because, in this type of alignment, the agent of a transitive and the subject of an intransitive are treated differently (the latter is treated syntactically like the patient of a transitive). Thus, the agent (ergative) gets promoted to absolutive and thus the former patient is demoted and less emphasized. The opposite is true for passive voices—they tend to be common in nominative accusative languages.

Rílin actually uses a split ergative system! So it gets both. :P

[permasleepymoth]

TransID flags! :D

I’ve always the Cloud Age Alignment System was really cool, but I haven’t been able to find any flags for it! So…I made them! :D

Lil chart thingie I found for the different names and symbols :3

Flags

I take flag and coining reqests!! Check my pinned post if you are interested!

[jabberwockypie]

I want to be very clear:

If you're going to respond to me on a post where I'm talking about the importance of voting, and how badly Trump fucked people over and is continuing to fuck people over with "But the Democrats-".

Eat my entire ass.

Fuck off.

Fuck off, fuck off, I hope that you suffer as much as the most vulnerable among us are under this administration.

[beargyufairy]

Sailor Moon

Sailor Venus

Sailor Mars

Sailor Mercury

Sailor Jupiter

[vatt1vv]

I’m being a hater real quick. You trans women sy truthers have your fun I too enjoy imagining sy with tits…. HOWEVER it’s way too simple a solution to sy’s gender weirdness. He has way too much of a complicated relationship with gender for it to simply be ‘Teehee estrogen would save him’ break free from the gender binary embrace genderqueer sy

[nonbinarynow]

Gender creativity and gender creatives will never not be beautiful in my opinion. I feel that xenogenderism, systems such as the galactic alignment system and the creation of new ways for enben to describe ourselves both in and out of relation to the binary is the forefront of queer gender abolitionism and individual binary deconstruction. It's wonderful to see that we are taking metaphors for gender, just like binary people, but we are running wild with them. It's queering gender, it's removing the seriousness of it, it's wholly enbiness. It's fully binary nonconforming. That is what being gender queer is all about.

[redtail-coins]

I am creating an umbrella term for the astral alignments. I wanted to do Astrian, but it would get confused with Asterian as the second name for Mesquin, so instead, may I bring you...

Novian

[Image ID: A 5 striped flag. Colors, in descending order, are: very dark purple; dusty red; dusty light orange; pale yellow; sky blue. End ID.]

Novian is an umbrella term for anyone who is stellian (mspec gay), lunian (mspec lesbian), solian (mspec veldian or turian), marsian (mspec cenelian unofficial), or mesrian/jupiteric (mspec straight). It is coined as an alternative to "mspec mono" because some novians do not identify with the term "mono(sexual, romantic, etc.)" and do not believe it describes their gayness, lesbianism, veldianism, cenelianism, or straightness. It is similar to Stellian in the fact that it is an umbrella term for other smaller terms, however unlike stellian, it is not specifically for people who identify as gay in some way.

Tagging @contradictory-label-culture-is because I first proposed the idea to them with the name "space mspecs", and @genderstarbucks because friend

[spilledinkandtearstainedpages]

About me (pjo):

Y’all this is the old intro and not as formatted as good so just check out the pinned post. Here is just now for more info. Love y’all

Name: αστρολουλουδα (astroloulouda, which means starflower) Yume σκοτάδι (skotádi)

Favorite nicknames: αστεριού (asterioú, which means star in Greek), Habibi/Habibti, Yume, αστέρι (astéri)

Type: demiprimordial (a demigod child of a primordial that is stronger than the rest of the primordial’s other demigod children and legacies) (demititans are stronger than most of the other children and legacies, especially if their a child of a titan, and demigod+legacies are your usual)

Child of Nyx

Blessed by Hestia and Nyx

Pronouns and gender orientation: he/she/they or we/us (usually only used by them and their head/bodymates), xenofluid/artemian

Sexual orientation: diamoric/aroace (they do experience romantic/sexual attraction, just only for one person only)

Partner: Isis Te Ario

Height: 6’8 ft aka 182.88 cm

Age: around 16-18 years old

Skin type: vitiligo

Ethnicity: Liberian, Ivorian (Ivory Coast), Hawaiian, Polynesian, Persian, Ålandic, Native American/Indigenous (Diné), and Greek

Languages they can speak: Spanish, Greek, Japanese, Hawaiian, French, Arabic, Khoisan, Russian, Irish, Swedish, Danish, Finnish, Norwegian, Icelandic, and Diné bizaad (Navajo language)

Birthday: Chinese New Year during a total eclipse (2007).

Powers: Umbrakinesis (power to control shadows), Umbraportation (power to teleport between shadows, basically shadow traveling but can go farther without getting as tired), Darkness solidification (that one explains itself), Pyrokinesis (the ability to control fire), Pyroportation (the ability to teleport through fire), and Fire breathing (that one explains itself). Because they are a demiprimordial, they were blessed with the ability to create and control/manipulate stars, which also allows them to know a lot of stars and be able read the stars easily. This is called χειραγώγηση δημιουργίας αστεριών (cheiragógisi dimiourgías asterión, meaning star creation manipulation in Greek) but is shortened down to αστέρι δημιουργία (astéri dimiourgía, meaning star create). They also gain telapathy

Powers (for those who don’t want to read through the explanation):

Umbrakinesis

Umbraportation

Darkness solidification

Pyrokinesis

Pyroportation

Fire breathing

Telapathy

χειραγώγηση δημιουργίας αστεριών (it would be good to check the explanation for this one)

Traits (things that come with being a demigod of ____): superhuman strength, senses, reflexes, speed, agility, endurance and durability in general, these traits are also enhanced during the night. Children of Nyx can absorb shadows to make them into a superhuman with strength that can rival that of Heracles. Also more powerful at night.

Fighting style: anything, can make it out of shadows and darkness. If that fails (they can’t get it to solidify), their hairstick can turn into any weapon they want.

Weapons: 416-C Carbine, khopesh, bow and arrow, trident, 4-Bore rifle (one bullet from it is about the size of a Campbell soup can)

Suffers from: Autism, ADHD, Dyslexia, severe Depression, Anxiety, DID, OCD, Separation Anxiety, Enochlophobia, severe chronic Insomnia, minor colorblindness, suicidal thoughts and ideations, Atelophobia, Athazagoraphobia, Kakorrhaphiophobia, Kenophobia (associated with lore), Lethophobia (also associated with lore), Social Anxiety, Social Phobia, a very small bit of Hypnophobia, Pupaphobia (also associated with lore), Autophobia, Age Regression, eating disorder

Songs that represents them: Fire on Fire by Sam Smith, Boys Feel Sad Too by Rosendale, Stitches by Shawn Mendes, Born to Die by Lana Del Ray, The Moon Will Sing by The Crane Wives

Favorite songs: My R by Lollia, 2 Days Into College (nightcore) by Neko, Sailor Song by Gigi Perez

Fatal flaw: the issue to trust anyone except their half-siblings. This is because during a war, gods and goddesses talk to them to try to convince them to come to their side due to the power they have. αστεριού only trusts underworld deities and Hestia+Hephaestus+Dionysus

Current voice claims: Katniss from The Hunger Games, Lucy Gray Baird from The Hunger Games (https://youtu.be/xcpLoLRfUTw), Megan Thee Stallion

It’s basically Rachel Zegler with a hint of Megan Thee Stallion

Aesthetic:

Fun facts:

Zeus is scared of Nyx and her children, so he’s scared of them.

They have dyed hair and wear a crown made by Morpheus.

Nyx, her husband, and their children are protective of αστεριού because they’re the first mortal child (Nyx/Erebus)/sibling (the children). This also applies to any of the demigod children of them, like Morpheus, Aether, Hypnos, Thanatos, etc. because they are suicidal

They often smuggle in alcohol for Mr. D and his kids, because it is literal torture to keep a god from their domain.

They are close with anyone from the Hecate cabin.

The way they were conceived was the Fates took a bit of their mom’s DNA and put it into a child.

Can intimidate monsters into either leaving them alone or helping them, making them valuable to go on quests, though they only go on ones with a Dionysus camper

They have selective mutism

Are an agere (not often)

They have some tattoos (shown in the aesthetic)

Weird facts about children of Nyx:

Their eyes glow in the dark.

They are connected to the stars so when a child, legacy, or champion of Nyx dies, they become a constellation associated with that star. Only demigods, supernatural, and clearsighted people can see the constellation

Each child of Nyx is born under a star, and αστεριού was born under Polaris, signifying their power.

Chdlren of Nyx drink the blood of monsters.

Children of Nyx are affected by light and especially light pollution.

Children of Nyx have the ability to change their gender and reproductive organs, though it takes some time to adjust to the feeling of their organs shifting.

Hanahaki flower/s (if you were to get hanahaki for them, this would be the flower you cough up)

Starflower

Coral honeysuckle

Backstory/lore bits: the Fates took a bit of Nyx’s DNA and added it to αστεριού. Once they were born, they were put out on the streets because their parents were disgusted by them. A homeless Japanese woman found αστεριού and took them in, naming them Yume, which means dream in Japanese. αστεριού called the woman Auntie, and she single-handedly raised them. Eventually she got a job and sent αστεριού to school. She had already been teaching them English and Japanese, and when she noticed that they had a proficiency in reading Greek, she bought a Greek dictionary that included the alphabet. Well, one day, Auntie was visited by the Fates, who explained their parentage and powers (they hadn’t gotten the fire ones yet). Shortly after, she died. When αστεριού found out, she was given her will, which gave them everything. It also included a letter to them telling them where to go. So they packed up and umbraported to CHB. There they were claimed and Dionysus took them into his cabin temporarily since there was no Nyx or Erebus cabin that anyone knew of. They met a legacy of the 9th goddess, a minor goddess over Wendigos and Skinwalkers, from the Native American pantheon (they have L O R E), who just immediately adopted them due to their Native American blood. They are called Wīhtikow.

Cabin: Zeus, being his usual dick self, told them they didn’t have a cabin, so Mr. D took them in temporarily. NOW THEY HAVE A CABIN! It’s sits on the edge of the woods, far from the rest, so they didn’t see it at first

Looks like:

Favorite campers: Superbstarlightsheep and ravensonofdionysus

Friends (help me add to this list by commenting and saying what name you want):

@mrsunshine17: Daniel, a really nice guy

@maggiemelodies09: Maggie, a really cool girl!

@lady-of-the-hunt19: Lady Artemis! One of my favorite goddesses

@goddess-queen-of-not-cheating: Lady Hera! Blessed me and Isis’ union

@brutus-of-roma: this is my kid now

Family (help me add to this list by commenting and saying what name you want):

@superbstarlightsheep (Jaxson, really fun to hang out with in the fields growing stuff)

@ravensonofhypnos (Ray’s nice, he helped me get used to the camp and hierarchy. Kept me from punching Zeus after I found it out)

@originalerebus (My new dad [I’ve never had one])

@morker-kid (my half/step sibling!)

@yes-im-hades (hades, my mentor in umbrakinesis)

@yes-im-nyx (MOM)

@god-of-smithing-and-cozy-vibes (Hephaestus, helping me with my pyrokinesis)

@epochus-god-of-time (Epochus, my big brother!)

@onlymythologypersonincamp (my sibling, Eve)

@melatonin-addiction (Estelle, also my sibling from my mom. Really has to stop breaking into my stash of melatonin)

@alexis-child-of-the-night (Alexis, another sibling on my mom’s side)

@messenger-and-rainbows (my partner’s mom)

Appearance: black hair with dyed light blue tips, vitiligo, always has a little shadow monster they call the 9th goddess (they are a OC Native American minor goddess of skinwalkers and wendigoes) or Wīhtikow following them. They wear a crop top, shorts, leg warmers, and a crown made and gifted by Morpheus. If they tie up their hair, they use a hair stick made by Erebus as a sign of acceptance into the family (each one of their children has one).

How they were claimed: told a bellhound (from Time and Time again, a WEBTOON) to sit and it obeyed. Now that bellhound, σκοτάδι (skotádi) helps protect the camp along with Mrs. O’Leary

Death (how they would go out, includes last words): Bleeding heavily from gashes and other wounds from monsters. Last words: I’m sorry guys. Just please remember to take care of σκοτάδι and that I’m proud of you.

Face credits: Amy Deanne

Hair tip color and hairstick credits: unfortunately I lost it

Appearance in Gacha Club (the app I use to make my characters since I can’t draw for crap and it won’t be colored even if I did)

Drawn by @little-ghostgirl-31

In case anyone is confused or wants to do a fanart of my character, their shirt actually wraps around their chest and the light part is the vitiligo pattern. Here is a picture of them with al their vitiligo patterns revealed. Please also try to include our little shadow, Wīhtikow.

Vitiligo patterns:

Their playlist:

Their shirt (pretend it’s black [credits: lost it]):

OOC cut:

Name: Faerywheel (preferred name)

Age: minor

Pronouns: he/she/they/fae/xe/zir/any (just ask)

Gender: multigender (will sometimes switch between genderfluid and pangender), faegender

Therian type: Fae, Wendigo, Cat, Chimera

Pronoun and name list: https://pronouns.cc/@Multigendermultishipper

[lurkiestvoid]

You're being targeted by disinformation networks that are vastly more effective than you realize. And they're making you more hateful and depressed.

(This essay was originally by u/walkandtalkk and posted to r/GenZ on Reddit two months ago, and I've crossposted here on Tumblr for convenience because it's relevant and well-written.)

TL;DR: You know that Russia and other governments try to manipulate people online. But you almost certainly don't how just how effectively orchestrated influence networks are using social media platforms to make you -- individually-- angry, depressed, and hateful toward each other. Those networks' goal is simple: to cause Americans and other Westerners -- especially young ones -- to give up on social cohesion and to give up on learning the truth, so that Western countries lack the will to stand up to authoritarians and extremists.

And you probably don't realize how well it's working on you.

This is a long post, but I wrote it because this problem is real, and it's much scarier than you think.

How Russian networks fuel racial and gender wars to make Americans fight one another

In September 2018, a video went viral after being posted by In the Now, a social media news channel. It featured a feminist activist pouring bleach on a male subway passenger for manspreading. It got instant attention, with millions of views and wide social media outrage. Reddit users wrote that it had turned them against feminism.

There was one problem: The video was staged. And In the Now, which publicized it, is a subsidiary of RT, formerly Russia Today, the Kremlin TV channel aimed at foreign, English-speaking audiences.

As an MIT study found in 2019, Russia's online influence networks reached 140 million Americans every month -- the majority of U.S. social media users.

Russia began using troll farms a decade ago to incite gender and racial divisions in the United States

In 2013, Yevgeny Prigozhin, a confidante of Vladimir Putin, founded the Internet Research Agency (the IRA) in St. Petersburg. It was the Russian government's first coordinated facility to disrupt U.S. society and politics through social media.

Here's what Prigozhin had to say about the IRA's efforts to disrupt the 2022 election:

"Gentlemen, we interfered, we interfere and we will interfere. Carefully, precisely, surgically and in our own way, as we know how. During our pinpoint operations, we will remove both kidneys and the liver at once."

In 2014, the IRA and other Russian networks began establishing fake U.S. activist groups on social media. By 2015, hundreds of English-speaking young Russians worked at the IRA. Their assignment was to use those false social-media accounts, especially on Facebook and Twitter -- but also on Reddit, Tumblr, 9gag, and other platforms -- to aggressively spread conspiracy theories and mocking, ad hominem arguments that incite American users.

In 2017, U.S. intelligence found that Blacktivist, a Facebook and Twitter group with more followers than the official Black Lives Matter movement, was operated by Russia. Blacktivist regularly attacked America as racist and urged black users to rejected major candidates. On November 2, 2016, just before the 2016 election, Blacktivist's Twitter urged Black Americans: "Choose peace and vote for Jill Stein. Trust me, it's not a wasted vote."

Russia plays both sides -- on gender, race, and religion

The brilliance of the Russian influence campaign is that it convinces Americans to attack each other, worsening both misandry and misogyny, mutual racial hatred, and extreme antisemitism and Islamophobia. In short, it's not just an effort to boost the right wing; it's an effort to radicalize everybody.

Russia uses its trolling networks to aggressively attack men. According to MIT, in 2019, the most popular Black-oriented Facebook page was the charmingly named "My Baby Daddy Aint Shit." It regularly posts memes attacking Black men and government welfare workers. It serves two purposes: Make poor black women hate men, and goad black men into flame wars.

MIT found that My Baby Daddy is run by a large troll network in Eastern Europe likely financed by Russia.

But Russian influence networks are also also aggressively misogynistic and aggressively anti-LGBT.

On January 23, 2017, just after the first Women's March, the New York Times found that the Internet Research Agency began a coordinated attack on the movement. Per the Times:

More than 4,000 miles away, organizations linked to the Russian government had assigned teams to the Women’s March. At desks in bland offices in St. Petersburg, using models derived from advertising and public relations, copywriters were testing out social media messages critical of the Women’s March movement, adopting the personas of fictional Americans.

They posted as Black women critical of white feminism, conservative women who felt excluded, and men who mocked participants as hairy-legged whiners.

But the Russian PR teams realized that one attack worked better than the rest: They accused its co-founder, Arab American Linda Sarsour, of being an antisemite. Over the next 18 months, at least 152 Russian accounts regularly attacked Sarsour. That may not seem like many accounts, but it worked: They drove the Women's March movement into disarray and eventually crippled the organization.

Russia doesn't need a million accounts, or even that many likes or upvotes. It just needs to get enough attention that actual Western users begin amplifying its content.

A former federal prosecutor who investigated the Russian disinformation effort summarized it like this:

It wasn’t exclusively about Trump and Clinton anymore. It was deeper and more sinister and more diffuse in its focus on exploiting divisions within society on any number of different levels.

As the New York Times reported in 2022,

There was a routine: Arriving for a shift, [Russian disinformation] workers would scan news outlets on the ideological fringes, far left and far right, mining for extreme content that they could publish and amplify on the platforms, feeding extreme views into mainstream conversations.

China is joining in with AI

[A couple months ago], the New York Times reported on a new disinformation campaign. "Spamouflage" is an effort by China to divide Americans by combining AI with real images of the United States to exacerbate political and social tensions in the U.S. The goal appears to be to cause Americans to lose hope, by promoting exaggerated stories with fabricated photos about homeless violence and the risk of civil war.

As Ladislav Bittman, a former Czechoslovakian secret police operative, explained about Soviet disinformation, the strategy is not to invent something totally fake. Rather, it is to act like an evil doctor who expertly diagnoses the patient’s vulnerabilities and exploits them, “prolongs his illness and speeds him to an early grave instead of curing him.”

The influence networks are vastly more effective than platforms admit

Russia now runs its most sophisticated online influence efforts through a network called Fabrika. Fabrika's operators have bragged that social media platforms catch only 1% of their fake accounts across YouTube, Twitter, TikTok, and Telegram, and other platforms.

But how effective are these efforts? By 2020, Facebook's most popular pages for Christian and Black American content were run by Eastern European troll farms tied to the Kremlin. And Russia doesn't just target angry Boomers on Facebook. Russian trolls are enormously active on Twitter. And, even, on Reddit.

It's not just false facts

The term "disinformation" undersells the problem. Because much of Russia's social media activity is not trying to spread fake news. Instead, the goal is to divide and conquer by making Western audiences depressed and extreme.

Sometimes, through brigading and trolling. Other times, by posting hyper-negative or extremist posts or opinions about the U.S. the West over and over, until readers assume that's how most people feel. And sometimes, by using trolls to disrupt threads that advance Western unity.

As the RAND think tank explained, the Russian strategy is volume and repetition, from numerous accounts, to overwhelm real social media users and create the appearance that everyone disagrees with, or even hates, them. And it's not just low-quality bots. Per RAND,

Russian propaganda is produced in incredibly large volumes and is broadcast or otherwise distributed via a large number of channels. ... According to a former paid Russian Internet troll, the trolls are on duty 24 hours a day, in 12-hour shifts, and each has a daily quota of 135 posted comments of at least 200 characters.

What this means for you

You are being targeted by a sophisticated PR campaign meant to make you more resentful, bitter, and depressed. It's not just disinformation; it's also real-life human writers and advanced bot networks working hard to shift the conversation to the most negative and divisive topics and opinions.

It's why some topics seem to go from non-issues to constant controversy and discussion, with no clear reason, across social media platforms. And a lot of those trolls are actual, "professional" writers whose job is to sound real.

So what can you do? To quote WarGames: The only winning move is not to play. The reality is that you cannot distinguish disinformation accounts from real social media users. Unless you know whom you're talking to, there is a genuine chance that the post, tweet, or comment you are reading is an attempt to manipulate you -- politically or emotionally.

Here are some thoughts:

Don't accept facts from social media accounts you don't know. Russian, Chinese, and other manipulation efforts are not uniform. Some will make deranged claims, but others will tell half-truths. Or they'll spin facts about a complicated subject, be it the war in Ukraine or loneliness in young men, to give you a warped view of reality and spread division in the West.

Resist groupthink. A key element of manipulate networks is volume. People are naturally inclined to believe statements that have broad support. When a post gets 5,000 upvotes, it's easy to think the crowd is right. But "the crowd" could be fake accounts, and even if they're not, the brilliance of government manipulation campaigns is that they say things people are already predisposed to think. They'll tell conservative audiences something misleading about a Democrat, or make up a lie about Republicans that catches fire on a liberal server or subreddit.

Don't let social media warp your view of society. This is harder than it seems, but you need to accept that the facts -- and the opinions -- you see across social media are not reliable. If you want the news, do what everyone online says not to: look at serious, mainstream media. It is not always right. Sometimes, it screws up. But social media narratives are heavily manipulated by networks whose job is to ensure you are deceived, angry, and divided.

Edited for typos and clarity. (Tumblr-edited for formatting and to note a sourced article is now older than mentioned in the original post. -LV)

P.S. Apparently, this post was removed several hours ago due to a flood of reports. Thank you to the r/GenZ moderators for re-approving it.

Second edit:

This post is not meant to suggest that r/GenZ is uniquely or especially vulnerable, or to suggest that a lot of challenges people discuss here are not real. It's entirely the opposite: Growing loneliness, political polarization, and increasing social division along gender lines is real. The problem is that disinformation and influence networks expertly, and effectively, hijack those conversations and use those real, serious issues to poison the conversation. This post is not about left or right: Everyone is targeted.

(Further Tumblr notes: since this was posted, there have been several more articles detailing recent discoveries of active disinformation/influence and hacking campaigns by Russia and their allies against several countries and their respective elections, and barely touches on the numerous Tumblr blogs discovered to be troll farms/bad faith actors from pre-2016 through today. This is an ongoing and very real problem, and it's nowhere near over.

A quote from NPR article linked above from 2018 that you might find familiar today: "[A] particular hype and hatred for Trump is misleading the people and forcing Blacks to vote Killary. We cannot resort to the lesser of two devils. Then we'd surely be better off without voting AT ALL," a post from the account said.")