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?
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
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
Nobody touts China as a utopia, but China does follow classical Marxist economics. I think you see Marx as predicting a far-future society as being fully collectivized and planned globally as also believing any socialist state must immediately become that far-future society, which is ironically the very Utopianism Marx and Engels spent so much effort debunking in their lifetimes.
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 mean, I’m not an ML. I just happened to wind up on this instance.
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.
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.
Since I blocked that instance my lemmy experience has been so great
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
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
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.
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).
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.
A KGB agent and a CIA agent meet up for drinks off the clock, and after a few drinks they start to talk shop. The CIA agent extols the strength of the Party’s propaganda, “All your citizens believe the propaganda! It’s incredible! So little dissent.” The KGB agent responds, “No my friend no, we are good at what we do, but you are the true masters of the art. No one at all questions your propaganda!” to which the CIA agent says, confused, “What do you mean? We don’t have propaganda?”
You see, your problem is that you left a comment on a .ml instance that doesn’t align with the hive mind. Those are places where someone will look you dead in the eye and tell you with the upmost certainty that China is a utopia and North Korea is the free-est country in the world. Tis a silly place
I am probably gonna find a pipebomb in my mailbox
Accidentally reading a post from .ml and not realizing it is a wild experience. For a second I thought everyone was just being super sarcastic, y’know, saying things ironically like if I said I was having a wonderful time in traffic. Then I realized it was an .ml post and everyone was serious
They just give those away? How generous!
It took me a while to realize this because I’m new to federated instances. When I learned “Oh, that’s where the problems are” I removed them.
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.
How to reduce Fediverse propaganda by 80% or more:
Note: Replace “lemmy.world” in the URL with your instance. e.g.
https://your-instance.xyz/settings
If your instance isn’t already de-federated from them, repeat for
lemmygrad.mlandhexbear.netand/orhexbear.com- whichever they use these days.Ahh, nice one! Thats really helpful, thanks!
that was a cryptoscam not a fediverse server. We always federated as hexbear.net.Hexbear.net is the one with the best emojis.
Don’t let the crazies make you self censor.
Thats what I was worried about. Half of me was like ”omg I’m never mentioning this country again". But then if its an established fact that said country is an egregious abuser of human rights then we should feel able to say it.
It’s just tankies, bunch of them come from .ml and since a lot of people block them, some have gotten wise and moved to a few other instances unfortunately. Tag them or block them and avoid interacting with .ml
Also remember the devs are both tankies…and not like “I have a USSR flag on the wall”, but full on CCP/putin/ruzzia shills.
I’ll happily call a tankie just a wannabe maga to their face.
You’re very brave
On the contrary, walk right up to their front door and bang on it.
I needed to see this today. Thank you.
Totally this!
The world has a propaganda problem. Fediverse is in the world.
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.
China, right? Yeahhh…
It sucks because I’ve been hearing about advances in social living out there, as well as seeing its indie game development scene explode, and I’m pretty envious and supportive - but I’m also absolutely going to highlight the worst of their government.
But unlike America, they don’t seem to have a notion of separating the government from its people. I know a random Chinese gamer isn’t responsible for Uyghur Muslim genocide. They still regard it as “xenophobia”, or “ignoring America’s crimes”.
ignoring America’s crimes
The most annoying thing about the whole experience was being told I was doing this (besides not being American). If anything I’m more critical of US than any other country.
Its not good vs evil. Just because one country does bad things it doesnt make them inherently bad or automatically make the opposite side good.
You benefit from America’s imperialist crimes directly and you (Americans largely, I don’t know you personally) do ignore them.
9-11 two buildings downed and the next two decades you genocide Iraqis for oil with 9-11 as justification. You labeled every middle eastern a terrorist and you’re close to doing it again for Israel. You do not separate people from governments or even militant groups you funded and trained, typically.
Americans lack of regard for the crimes of their empire is directly responsible for the suffering of the global south. Your country commits genocide and all you care to do about it is right amongst yourselves over which capitalist funded genocide supporting political party should rule.
I don’t know the context of your comments and the replies, you could have linked them but you didn’t, and I don’t feel like going through your comment history. But it does appear you don’t understand the role American imperialism plays in the world and how Americans benefit from the direct suffering of other nations.
Americans have been protesting of piss poor foreign policy of their country. That is why isolationism have become a popular platform after all to run on. But in China? You don’t see people protesting against Beijing claiming the entire South China Sea. Russia arrests anyone who protests against the war in Ukraine. There is an ocean of difference.
thanks for feeding my block list
If you want to highlight China’s failures, pick real ones, like their support of Israel, willingness to sell arms to American vassals like Philippines that are used to crush revolutionary movements, the invasions of Vietnam, not fabrications by western media.
Whenever I’ve encountered propaganda or have been flamed for talking about human rights, etc. it’s been from instances ending in “.ml”.
I don’t know what that means, but I would like to be able to block all “.ml” users.
I’m no expert but I think you can block whole instances, yes.
You can it’s in the settings. I blocked the “.ml” instance.
that blocks posts but not comments.
TIL
ml is the ur-instance
you are powerless
say something nice about Pol Pot
say something nice about Pol Pot
Uh…I like that Dead Kennedy’s song?
The Central Committee has decided not to execute you! (for now)
Honestly, same. :| The memes community is particularly gnarly at times. I wish I could shuffle my account like I can on Masto and keep my old posts.
AFAIK .ml is meant as TLD for Mali and in this case(s) has been chosen to reflect their views as standing for “marxist-leninist”.
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.
Actually, it was because r/GenZedong was banned. r/communism is more extreme than the devs, because they (along with r/communism101) support Gonzalo and the Shining Path of Peru, which Marxist-Leninists do not.
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
Possibly. Me personally, I’m not getting paid to post. Not yet. I’m working up to that. Eventually, I plan to print out pro-China comments I’ve made and fax them to the Chinese embassy in the hopes that they’ll hire me. For now, I’m just padding out my CV.
This whole conspiracy theory is so bonkers. Lemmy was created by communists. You look inside, you find communists, and then it’s all this “What!? People who disagree with me!? On the internet??? Impossible! They must be paid secret agents!!!”
If you want to avoid the existential horror of realizing that people exist with different views from you, different instances have different user experiences, and you’re free to choose one that doesn’t federate with communists.
It’s very well documented that Russia, China, Iran and others operate troll farms to influence people on the internet.
Just those countries?
They’re the top three.
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)_/¯
