Just curious if anyone has seen a change in the trolling, memes, etc on the internet/twitter etc since the Russian actions in Ukraine? Are we seeing a drop in areas of US/Western politics as those resources are directed towards a different offensive front?
To me, the trolling dropped to near zero for about 24 hours afterward. Then it started ramping back up, but has failed to reach the normal pre-invasion level.<p>I think pro-Russia trolls really had to stop and think, because there was no easy way to defend what was happening, and nobody was going to be deflected by what-aboutism for a while. And anti-Russian trolls didn't <i>have</i> to troll; they could stick strictly to reality and do just fine. And trolls on any other axis were just ignored; nobody had attention for them.<p>Just my experience. Your mileage may vary.
The tone of social media definitely changed. How much is organic and how much is due to engineering discourse is always hard to tell. But things have moved so quickly, and to such an extreme, it feels somewhat artificial. But of course, measuring these things is difficult. There's certainly some aspect that is being pushed by the powers that be, as we know warfare occurs online now as well
It's weird how Hacker News went from quoting Smedley Butler and Noam Chomsky to everyone suddenly being an armchair general pushing pieces around the Risk board of their minds almost overnight.
now would be a good time for contrast and comparison of heat maps relating trollish content to IP, before and after; producing a very raw metric of troll origin from regions now kicked off the internet
Personally I’m seeing a huge uptick in memes on the right that are portraying Putin as some resistance to the globalists and framing that as a good thing. Lots of “US is the real problem not Russia” trolling. Turning every discussion into a deep dive into whataboutism.