this post was submitted on 20 Sep 2024
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MeanwhileOnGrad
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Hexbear is legitimately filled with right wing trolls pretending to be leftists.
I'm not unconvinced that the whole leftist presence on that federated side of Lemmy is a psyop.
Lemmy is far too small and unimportant to attract any governments or psyops. Extremism comes in all flavours.
Sounds like something the feds would say
Get out of my walls or I'll turn up the thermostat again
Or it's the perfect, extremely cost effective training ground for Russian propagandists before they get promoted to Facebook and Reddit.
The main dev instance is literally a safe space for Russian and Chinese propaganda. Why is this so difficult to believe?
Because it's nonsense, think of it logistically.
Why would shills bother with Lemmy when they're already extreme? Why water a floodplain, you know? They're already converted; they don't need any more shilling. Why wouldn't they pull all their resources to mainstream social media like twitter or reddit, which has everyones attention? No international news or big influencers exist on Lemmy. It is a loss of resources.
People are just extreme. Being paranoid and calling everyone you don't like a shill or a bot ignores the fact that some people just have extreme views. They ain't bots, they ain't shills, they're just bigots in safespaces and afraid of discussion. Pretending that extremists naturally don't exist makes you as paranoid as they are. This community has been called psyops, and myself a foreign agent more times than I can count. You're not a shill. I'm not a shill. Don't stoop to their level, basically.
(I'm not saying they aren't affected by shills. The propaganda they willingly consume originates from psyops on different websites, but they aren't the prime target)
Especially in all forms of stupidity
Are you sure though? I'm just imagining Xi being like "write that down, write that down!" after every crazy take
Fairly sure. I've seen some Chinese nationalists in Lemmygrad and Hexbear's personal chatrooms, but I don't think they're federal agents.
My bet is on troll factory workers slinging ideas around to see what and who sticks, and then they continue to sling ideas with their growing group. That was what the early days strategy of The_Donald on reddit were.
It doesn't matter that lemmy is relatively unimportant, what matters to them is having a testbed for what is and isn't sticking along with growing a crowd of supporters they might be able to take elsewhere where it matters.
Why do you think this?
They tried to pretend Lemmy was just software and call "their platform" Haxbear, in some sad attempt to culture-roll Lemmy itself.
Not a really square plan when 90% of the user base are leftist socialist code-monkies.
They should rename Haxbear to "Rekt Center".
"The second coming of Stalin"
anyone who complains about reeducation camps will be banned or shot
that's satire, right?.... right, guys?
Wrong. They're just extreme.
It's more than just extreme. There are several... really continuously happening examples of them spouting off straight up GOP and Russian information warfare which is very far removed from anything resembling their alleged politics. And this is taking into consideration their silly "imperialism is when USA" framework, and their penchant for accelerationism *and* their particularly outdated view of leftist philosophy.
There are two possibilities here - they are either so out of touch and steeped in anti-liberalism that they've come full circle to becoming a far right safe space, or a significant portion of their user base are trolls.
Whatever the motivation, clearly they're just morally bad people
yeah, I don't doubt they repeat the propaganda. I think they're just a part of the pipeline as opposed to being directly fed propaganda.
Tankies like Modern Russia because Russia opposes the US. If anything opposes the US, even if that thing is opposite of their ideals, then they'll still support them.
They don't have complex views, just full-circle.