Soon after I joined Lemmy a few years ago, I searched for communities based on my interests and subscribed to the ones with the highest numbers of users to ensure they are active. Sometimes I joined multiple, but then saw that some people post the same thing to more than one, cluttering my feed, so I left the smaller ones.
It’s only after my community ban from [email protected] for disagreeing about Ukraine that I was told about MeanwhileOnGrad, learning exactly what “the tankie triad” means and why big Lemmy instances have defederated from those. Lemmy.ml, where the ML probably stands for Marxist-Leninist, seems to have been defederated by fewer, possibly because it’s run by the creator of Lemmy, Dessalines. Nevertheless, there is evidence of Dessalines holding the same authoritarian communist views as the rest.
Recently, there were two posts on [email protected] about Signal, but then in both cases, admin davel (who is known on MoG for seeing CIA’s hand in running Ukraine, among other things) and Dessalines linked (1, 2, 3) the same article by Dessalines, which not only argues Signal could be a CIA honeypot (as if it matters when proper e2ee is used), but also manages to shoehorn China even into that, claiming its government “prefers autonomy”. This sort of portrayal of totalitarianism as sovereignty is the reason I unsubscribed from the community. As it has been said by others, ML is not a neutral instance but a means of pushing authoritarian views onto unsuspecting users.
Edit: Made the post title clearer.
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I think you’re absolutely right here. Those instances were designed to appeal to the broader umbrella of social equality and left-leaning audiences, while simultaneously pushing clearly tankie-style propaganda !
Your life on the fediverse improves significantly if you just block the entire lemmy.ml and hexbear.net instances.
Getting closer and closer to that! The reason I made this post to begin with is to do a PSA, because it took me months of being subscribed to games on Hexbear to notice it’s not a leftist community as it presents itself, but authoritarian communist. So I can’t be certain all of their users are in the know, but is it worth keeping the instances unblocked if the bad outweighs the possibility of good?
Much of the “left” communities here veer towards the auth right with a light “left rebranding”
you can kick rocks with your horseshoe theory
Western propaganda bubble is warm and cozy, just close the window so you stop feeling cold nasty drafts.
You’re right.
Russian fed propaganda is sooo good.
/s just in case
Unfortunately I am considering creating lengthy black lists of trolls and irreversibly corrupted/poisoned instances. Still better than using a corporate operated political brainwashing platform.
I see it as curation. My blocklists are yuuuuge.
Is there any way of sharing blocklists? That would be a killer feature!
I wish so too, I’ve been wanting to make a new account on an instance with no defederations but the thought of restarting my blocklist makes me wanna delete lemmy
Noooo “calling it “authoritarian” is meaningless”!!!
Stop “phrasemongering”, it’s “not fascism” when China pulls its shit! China also not guilty of Uyghur genocide, that’s western propaganda you racist!
Smh. Tankie propaganda was making me mad, I’m actually glad I got banned off their subs for adamantly refusing to accept their lines of reasoning for their blatant, apologetic, wholly uncritical acceptance of china.
What portion of the tankie userbase do we think are Chinese intelligence assets? Or at best, shills?
The down vote shaping on this thread I think supports this notion. It’s something that I have seen and personally experienced on Reddit. And, it seems that liberal left wingers are invariably the target.
My experience has always been that tankies, regardless of community, are exceedingly rare in the wild of a western nation. With leftist views usually comes compassion, and that prevents the development of authoritarian views.
There is something wrong with the proportions on Lemmy. There’s more going on than fringe local western tankies. Perhaps Dessalines insistence that Signal was a honeypot, is a projection about Lemmy.ml?
down vote shaping
Downvotes are publicly available. If you can identify unlabeled downvote bots, admins will probably ban them.
There’s been an uptick of downvotes and new users leaving critical comments since the Hexbear thread linking this one. Though Hexbear is defederated from .world, I’m pretty sure that if you examine the downvotes, you’re going to find barely active alt accounts of users from Hexbear. There’s one who literally quoted a point from that thread.
Edit: Also of note is that after they made that thread, they revisited the Ukraine thread from 10 months ago and removed my comments individually to make them harder to access. They know no reasonable person reading them is going to come to their conclusion that I’m a “fascist sympathizer” for essentially siding with Ukraine. Thankfully, they have no control over the Web Archive version also found at the OP link.
I’ve gotten into it with tankies time and time again over Signal. They point to all this hypothetical nonsense repeatedly and then refuse to provide evidence. Signal, on the other hand, has proven that they either don’t have this info or don’t provide it over and over again through publicly-disclosed subpoenas, but the tankies continue to push this propaganda, which one can only reasonably conclude that they’re bad-faith actors and just “haters” of all things American.
The actual reason they don’t like signal is because China bans it and they need an excuse for why that isn’t just transparently authoritarian bullshit so they have created this entire lore around it being a CIA honeypot.
I don’t give their opinions on China, Russia, NK, Iran, Ukraine, any sort of credibility. I’ve been banned from some of their comms but they’re on point for pointing out the crimes and hypocrisy of the west, and there’s a lot of deliberate effort to minimize their reach.
Fuck em’ for defending authoritarianism but without them it’s all propaganda from mass mainstream media and whitewashing of the west.
tldr: Fuck tankies and wankies trying to whitewash their atrocities with concern trolling.
I really am not sure what you mean - at least on Lemmy. I don’t see pro-western propaganda. In fact everyone is highly critical and self aware of the vast majority of the West’s moves and motives. Even articles of the rare positive moves are met with skepticism and pessimism.
The problem is that the tankies automatically attack any post by someone being critical of any other non-western nations as being hypocritical. An argument by hypocrisy. Annoying as hell, a yapping ankle-biting tiny dog constantly interrupting the conversation with “But the West did/does (insert awful thing) too!” when 99.99% of the time we’re well aware of the West’s failings, and those failings don’t mean other’s can’t be pointed out.
Pro western propaganda is often not just about promoting western countries. It also includes lying about enemies of the west. Pro western media also has a disproportionate focus on the faults of its enemies. It totality that kind of bias suggests there is an imbalance between the harms caused by the west and other countries leaning in the west’s favor.
I think plenty of westerners can identify the lies western media tells about the west. Thats easy enough to do given westerners have first hand experience living in western countries. Unfortunately, even well intentioned westerners are much worse at identifying those other forms of propaganda. As such, they have a hard time understanding geopolitical conflict between western nationals and other countries.
Personaly, I find the “argument by hypocrisy” isn’t really what critics of the west are doing. Instead, bringing up the harms caused by the west is meant to undermine the credibility of a western source and/or criticize it for its lack of focus on harms caused by the west. If you avoid jumping to accusations of “whataboutism” and engage in good faith, I’m confident many of the people you claim are “tankies” will give you a much more nuanced critique of the countries you think they’re reflexively defending.
Instead, bringing up the harms caused by the west is meant to undermine the credibility of a western source and/or criticize it for its lack of focus on harms caused by the west.
More broadly, the atomic unit of propaganda isn’t lies, its emphasis. The way effective propaganda integrates facts into its story leads the reader to come up with a desired narrative almost on their own.
You can’t really attack this type of propaganda with evidence, because true facts are being used to tell a lie, all you can do is provide a broader perspective to show how narrow and distorted the initial one was. This looks exactly like “whataboutism”.
Something something parenti quote
spoiler
“In the United States, for over a hundred years, the ruling interests propagated anti communism amping the populace, until it became more like a religious orthodoxy than a political analysis. During the Cold War the anti communist ideological framework could transform any data about existing communist societies into hostile evidence. If Soviets refused to negotiate a point they were intransigent and belligerent; if they appeared willing to make concessions, this was but a skillful ploy to put us off guard. By opposing arms limitations they would have demonstrated their aggressive intent; but when in fact they supported most armaments treaties it was because they were mendacious and manipulative. If the churches in the USSR were empty this demonstrated that religion was suppressed; but if the churches were full this ment the people were rejecting the regime’s atheistic ideology. If the workers went on strike (as happened on infrequent occasions) this was evidence of their alienation from the collectivist system. If they didn’t go on strike it was because they were intimidated and lacked freedom. A scarcity of consumer goods demonstrated failure of the economic system; and improvement in consumer goods only meant that the leaders were attempting to placate a restive population and so maintain a firmer hold over them. If communist in the US played an important role struggling for the rights of workers, the poor, African Americans, women, and others this was only a their guileful way of gathering support among disenfranchised groups and aging power for themselves. How one gained power by fighting for powerless groups was never explained. What we are dealing with is an unfalsefiable orthodoxy so assiduously marketed by the ruling interests that it affected people across the political spectrum.”
