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.
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.
I see you’ve met hexbear and lemmy.ml. They’re not trolls or bots. They’re just plain ol’ idiots.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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”
Lemmy is a software; there are multiple instances (servers) that run lemmy and federate (talk) to each other. So it does not sanitise your feed the way corporate social media does. The advantage is that you do not end up in an echo chamber. The downside is that you get the weirdest and most incoherent conspiracy theories known to man. But you’re (hopefully) an adult, and can use your reason to decide what’s what.
The advantage [of Lemmy] is that you do not end up in an echo chamber.
I wouldn’t be so sure about that haha
But its easier to pick or flip between echo chambers!
Your instance literally determines your echo chamber lol. And if you run your own then you determine whom you want to federate with. Unless you regularly flip between instances you’re very certainly in one.
How they do?
I am only scrolling the Home feed. No local or global feed.
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)_/¯
