They’ve gotten very strange in the past year or so. I’ve seen multiple dbzer0 users, including two admins, do complete 180s on tankie bullshit, and it’s rather bizarre.

My best guess is that tankies offer them a sense of community, which is how many terminally online folk get drawn into it. People who have a deep desire for community will overlook moral issues if invited to be a part of that community, and even adopt, consciously or unconsciously, those positions in order to better ‘fit in’ with the community.

In a time when the real world is more recognizably hostile than ever, or at least for as long as most of us here have been alive (insofar as we are both aware of it and noting that it is backsliding rather than improving), online communities probably seem quite tempting to hew closer to.

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[–] TrippyFocus@lemmy.ml 6 points 1 month ago (1 children)

Thanks it’s been a while since I read the report and couldn’t remember if that section was another one where they used Zenz or what the source of the claims was.

[–] Chana@hexbear.net 7 points 1 month ago

It's basically all Zenz and ASPI but they do the thing that high schoolers do when they want to just repeat what Wikipedia says but aren't allowed to cite it directly: cite the sources on Wikipedia.