Ask Lemmy

Thats .ml for you where they decided to be so left leaning that they did a u-turn to totaliarism.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

I see you've met hexbear and lemmy.ml. They're not trolls or bots. They're just plain ol' idiots.

Was it Russia and China by any chance?

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.

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.

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”.

Yes, Hexbear and the .ml instances are fully CCP and Russia brainwashed.

The rest is actually mostly fine, although the German instances have a really hard time with criticism of the IDF, but that's a historical issue they will grow out of.

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.

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

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?"

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.

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.

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 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...

The world has a propaganda problem. Fediverse is in the world.

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.

Don’t let the crazies make you self censor.

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.

Ah, you must have encountered some tankies. I finally got tired of it and just blocked hexbear and .ml stuff. My lemmy experience is much better without it.

I was bombarded by long posts that parroted propaganda

Turns out that when you define "propaganda" as "anything that I disagree with", and then go to spaces where a lot of people disagree with you, you're going to see a lot of "propaganda".

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.

Why does it matter if the responses are from patriotic citizens or not?

"Bad faith" is lunacy, who cares? Arguments matter all on their own, regardless of the motivation for making them.

Of course you "think" they are paid trolls or bots, we all see that constantly. My first post on Reddit years ago was followed immediately by charges of being a Russian spy. Maybe they were a Russian spy and I was diversion?

Anyway, troll, bot, human, paid or not, irrelevant. The discussion is seen by others and judged on the merit of the argument itself. Stop worrying about the source, as you can never know, so it doesn't matter. It's not as if you get better results by talking to an unpaid patriotic person. Same shit.

Propaganda problem? Not at all. Every form of social media is rife with propaganda, as is every paper, website, news channel, and so on. How could Lemmy be any different?

Ive been here less than a week and have encountered multiple extremists, schizo level posts, and just ludicrous positions to take.

It's clear that things like moderates and centrism dont have much of a home here.

It is what it is but ill say this.

Do not be afraid to just block them, theres not that many people here.