In the past week I’ve been absolutely roasted for criticising two different countries. Normally I’d be okay with that, I can handle a mild toasting and after all debate is a good thing.
On both occasions though I was flamed for mentioning human rights issues that are established facts and have been known for many, many years. I was critical of the actions/laws of their governments and not the people, their race, religion, general political ideology or nationality.
On both occasions I was bombarded by long posts that parroted propaganda, and in the case of one country I was told (on multiple occasions) that I was ignorant, racist and even fascist for mentioning the issues I did. I’m not complaining about how I was treated, but as a reminder, I was discussing internationally-recognised human rights concerns that can be verified and based in fact.
I could just be paranoid but I’m fairly convinced the responses weren’t from patriotic citizens. I think they were paid trolls or bots, and I think their purpose was to quiet negative talking points about the countries that were mentioned.
Has anyone else had a similar experience?
Thats .ml for you where they decided to be so left leaning that they did a u-turn to totaliarism.
PSA: in the settings you can block whole instances, and if you want to eliminate this annoying problem, just block *.lemmy.ml and any instance that contains the string “hexbear”.
Problem solved.
I see you’ve met hexbear and lemmy.ml. They’re not trolls or bots. They’re just plain ol’ idiots.
The world has a propaganda problem. Governments and regimes worldwide have been spending millions and millions in propaganda for a century, the society we live in is rotten to the core, the average person is brainwashed to pick a side and thinking in left and right. Mass media have been a tool of the propaganda and have been used as a distraction weapon since their creation.
Lemmy borrowed it’s layout from reddit which is shaped and tailored around censure and propaganda. Just look at the all frontpage, the most popular subs are the same as reddit and you can’t really post anything useful in these, your observation about propaganda had to be turned into a question to fit in the ask lemmy sub.
Block and move on. I think I’ve blocked most of ml at this point, but there are a few normal users. At least 2.
Blocking bad-faith-arguers and general shitheads has definitely improved my experience on the internet.
That’s way more than on Reddit by at least 2!
c/unexpectedfactorial
Oh… Nevermind.
Some of the lemmy.ml people are weirdly intolerant of beliefs that they don’t personally hold. It’s not the userbase as a whole. You just gotta expect it from them.
lmao the way they all type, it’s more like the same dude and 200 alt accounts. They all react the same, give the same info, use the same insults. It’s like a Facebook group.
Bizarro MAGA
I love coming back from a 1 line post to a reply with 12 paragraphs with citations like 7 minutes later. It’s like opening a present on llm Christmas. No one calls them out like they’re actually typing all that.
Honestly if they were actually typing all that, it would be genuinely psychotic and scary.
because they all believe the same bullshit verison of marxism leninism and they think it’s the Word of God and will creating the Utopia.
They tout Marxism then present China as some utopia.
“I love chocolate cake!”
offers you lemon custard
And stale bread from the soviet union.
I mean, I’m not an ML. I just happened to wind up on this instance.
it’s the Word of God and will creating the Utopia.
It’s crazy watching you guys build up your mythology about us while making it clear that you’ve never actually read anything we say, because this is literally the opposite of what we say. At a certain point it’s just like “yeah that version of us you have does sound bad, but it also doesn’t resemble us at all, so whatever.”
I think they all just use an LLM to make their posts for them.
Most of them aren’t even Chinese by the way their replies come and go. Hot hours mark most of them as Euros.
The biggest supporters of authoritarian communism have always been middle class western kids.
Since I blocked that instance my lemmy experience has been so great
YES LEMMY HAS A MASSIVE PROPAGANDA PROBLEM
the level of utter bullshit parroted on Lemmy is on an astonishing level. anything political, international or even technological is broken beyond belief and descends into hatred almost immediately.
you can have discussions on Lemmy but you’ll have to wade through all the horrible people that got banned from reddit for very obvious reasons
Says the Zionist
I think its more than this. Some of them came to my dms sounding more like (i’m sorry if I sound crazy) china agents. They really seem like they are doing this for a living and to live
I’ve experienced this, but only for Russia and China specifically. Most of it your typical tankie behavior, but not all of it comes from ml users.
You probably spoke to .ml users. They are some of the most wilfully ignorant pro-CCP and pro-Kremlin users. Some are, without a doubt, paid trolls.
As another user mentioned, look if the username ends in .ml but there are such propagandists who have non-.ml accounts and post nonsensical verbages that .ml usually parrots.
don’t forget dbzero
In my experience, dbzero is quite different. More anarchist as they claim themselves, much less defending (authoritarian) states and you don’t get a cohort of downvotes when disagreeing (unless you meet on .ml grounds, which then is the usual .ml downvotes whatever you say).
Problem with dbzero is they don’t prune their own gardens, because why would they? that wouldn’t be very anarchist of them would it? the amount of ml/hexbear/programming.dev trolls on their instance makes dbzero seem similar to ml.
further lemmy.ca has the same problem but instead of communists it’s conservatives/maga. I wouldn’t doubt if Russian and Chinese troll farms weren’t using lemmy.ca accounts to fan the flames of descent between the rest of the world and the US.
And hexbear.
Was it Russia and China by any chance?
Both governments are assholes. As is USA and Israel. Add North Korea, Saudi Arabia and all other religious dictatorships to the list.
There’s people going a little too hard on supporting Iran right now just because they’re embarrassing America or gleeful that any western aligned nation in the region is getting bombed, as if any of the citizens in the cross fire had any choice in that.
If they were .ml, hexbear, or several other instance users… Yea. Their instances are echo chambers for their own dumbass ideologies.
Different instances have different ideologies and cultures they prefer, which cannot happen on twitter or other monolith services.
You’ll just have to learn to ignore the absolute braindead takes rampant from some instances, and don’t feel bad for blocking the cretins that don’t care for human rights.
You’ll just have to learn to ignore the absolute braindead takes
No you don’t :)
You can block them, or whole instances, depending on the client your are using
One of the things I see a lot on Lemmy is people saying it reminds them of the old internet, and it does for me too, but alongside that comes a hefty dose of communism or anarchism, depending on the echo chamber.
Lemmy is a bit communist overall, but not the Marx and Trotsky kind. It’s very authoritarian friendly. I am not sure why, but it is a little annoying.
The Holodomor is real, and it wasn’t an accident.
I believe it’s because the original software it’s built on is created by a group with those views. That’s what I’ve picked up on at least.
It is real, but it was an accident.
Let me guess, Lemmy.ml? That’s normal, that instance (and lemmy as a project) was created because the creators were too extreme for /r/communism and thus banned from it.
Yes, anytime China is criticized for human rights abuses (and rightly so) replies are flooded with wall-of-text “rasonable explainers” sealioning why one should never criticize China, especially not Americans.
I was once told I was racist against Chinese people because I didn’t like how democracy was crushed in Hong Kong and I didn’t like all of the threats against Taiwan. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
i think people are too quick to call anyone like that a “paid troll”. like i just don’t think one can reasonably expect a government like china to waste their resources on a platform as small as the threadiverse…
Also often they would not need to pay anyone. Especially for cases like china or the US there are already enough people, that are so deep in the ideology, that they will do it in their free time. Lots of of such people everywhere.
If you mentioned China or Russia in these comments then yes there are lots of tankies. And yes they parrot propaganda but you may actually be interacting with someone who has internalised said propaganda not an organized campaign like you would see on reddit and Facebook. So view it as an opportunity to interact rather than something to wholely avoid.
I was banned for being involved because I used the word tankie. They didn’t care about my arguments. So fuck this view, they’re as lost as MAGAts.
I think one was a post about China in .ml, and the other may have been a response to something about S.A., didnt bother checking much further.
Also worth mentioning that there is propaganda on both sides: it’s really difficult to know what’s true. People also like to throw around terms without knowing what they mean and make assumptions that may not be grounded in fact (E.G., communism = authoritarianism: there are entire communist schools of thought dedicated to critiquing authoritarianism and how power has been / should be used in communist projects).
On some level it’s all true, there’s no consolidation of power that’s perfectly clean. Power is amassed from asymmetric exchanges, so there is some victim somewhere whenever it is amassed.
If it’s violence or just the threat of violence, or if the exchange was voluntary or not it’s the same.
A great point. That’s exactly the problem the libertarian socialists have been trying to solve for 100 years, and they have actually recorded some pretty intelligent thoughts on the matter in that time.
I get so frustrated with the “communism is unequivocally bad because my oligopolistic government told me so since childhood and I’ve never actually looked into it” crowd. Not because of their beliefs, but because they’re grounded in nothing of substance. And any attempt at all to say “well have you actually thought about this, because there’s nuance” is met with foaming mouths and flying spittle.
(Prefacing this with a disclaimer, because reading comprehension is in the toilet these days, that in the following paragraph I am addressing a hypothetical “you” and I am not actually asking anyone these questions)
Like, communism bad? Sure, maybe. Let’s talk about it. Okay, which communist ideology are you talking about? And are you talking about the ideology itself, or the specific ways in which various projects have attempted to implement it? Do those implementation attempts align with the ideology? Why or why not? And are you aware of the critiques of that ideology and / or approach by other communists, or are you just parroting what you’ve heard from other people who also have not read a book on the topic?
I genuinely do not not have it in me to care what people believe, but seeing people react like agitated weasels—screaming, crying, and flailing when something they in no way understand is raised in conversation just makes me despair for the species, and wonder whether people actually put any thought into their positions at all!
Such a shame all countries that have catched communism have descended into dictatorships huh.
Also the “both sides” is such an outdated propaganda lie, used to deflect what is actually discussed (most classic: What About the USA??!).
Such a shame all countries that have catched communism have descended into dictatorships huh.
Almost like the anti-authoritarian schools of thought aren’t adopted by people who are keen to size state power or something, eh? Like those people would adopt different tactics or something? Like, maybe Juche and Anarcho-Syndicalism are different things with different approaches?
Also the “both sides” is such an outdated propaganda lie
So, are you saying that anti-communist propaganda doesn’t exist?
In my original comment, I wasn’t making an argument for or against communism. What I was saying is that people don’t know what they’re talking about and react on a hair trigger (because of years of propaganda). And you’ve just illustrated that beautifully.
Like, I don’t care what you believe, but maybe pick up a book and come to understand an ideology before you criticize it?
Love your paintings by the way. Especially the one with the window on the yellow wall. I’d totally buy a print of that.
Lol continue running around in circles 😂
“U stopid, read this propaganda book”
Sure mr who hasn’t fallen for the propaganda itself lol.
Blocked.
