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?
You weren’t flamed for mentioning established facts, but for dogmatically repeating easily disproven claims. People brought receipts and explained how your views were not actually based on evidence but instead propaganda, and now you’ve deleted those comments, making it hard for others to verify that they were indeed wrong. You weren’t using internationally-recognized consensus, but purely western consensus, portraying that western consensus as the totality of international thought.
Either way, no, no paid trolls nor bots, just a bunch of communists. Lemmy was made and developed by communists, so there are lots of communists here.
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.
Thats .ml for you where they decided to be so left leaning that they did a u-turn to totaliarism.
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.
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.
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.
100% but I wouldn’t call it a problem. I find it’s often refreshing to see the stupidity around you and not have it hidden behind a veil. I think you also get more genuine information here it just requires more from you to not get got.
This place has a very communist leaning userbase and with that comes a with a lot of tankies and chiaboos.
In the end USA and Europe have a lot of similar issues and that’s growing so it’s not like they are morally superior, but ya know tankies and co are very good at ignoring issues just as much as any red blood American.
“communist”
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.
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.
I mean, I’m not an ML. I just happened to wind up on this instance.
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.
And stale bread from the soviet union.
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 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.
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
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.
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.
Lemmy does have a propaganda problem, and it is not from the instances you’re referring to.
Didnt refer to any instances mate
They’re from .ml, don’t mind them.
