Has anyone else noticed how prevalent Hexbear posters have suddenly become? Maybe sometime last week I noticed nearly every political post had at least one long thread of Hexbear users that do nothing but repeat CCP talking points while waving anyway anything even remotely reliable as Western propaganda. That or getting all excited about trolled libs. The way they tell it, you’d think everything from DW, to Fox, to Propublica, to straight up AP News articles, are all written by the same people.
Not to mention, their info on the Fediverse observer is either straight up wrong or there’s some serious botting going on. According to that, the instance is less than a month old, yet somehow they already have one of the largest, most active userbases, along with far and away the most comments of any instance.
Seems to me like Lemmygrad on steroids. Considering we defederated from them, seems like a no-brainer to block Hexbear as well.
So glad this thread could become such a perfect microcosm of why we need to defederate.
the instance is less than a month old
smartest, most well researched midwesterner
Hexbear is actually one of the oldest Lemmy instances, been around for over three years. Due to technical issues around our high number of active users and having to rely on volunteer labour, we have only been able to federate within the last few weeks.
The way they tell it, you’d think everything from DW, to Fox, to Propublica, to straight up AP News articles, are all written by the same people.
Because they are. This isn’t even a radical far left idea. Ever heard of “Manufacturing Consent” by Noam Chomsky? That’s one of the main arguments, that the media is owned and controlled by the capitalist class.
Lemmy was built by communists and the audacity of these liberals to come here and demand shelter from exposure to communists is really something
I have no problem with communism, I have a problem with authoritarian propaganda.
Let’s not pretend that your politics aren’t inherently authoritarian as well.
Either you support capitalism (or worse), which is grossly authoritarian as it inflicts massive violence not only via warfare but through mass starvation and deprivation, or you support socialism, in which case you have two options:
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The violent overthrow of the current system (spoiler alert: that’s a very authoritarian thing to do!)
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The gradual reform of the current system, meaning maintaining the status quo for an exceptionally long time as we ever so slowly creep our way to a more just economic system while countless people starve, go homeless, die without healthcare, end up in yet-another war and so on (which is a very authoritarian proposition, just throwing away the lives of the poor in your own country-not to mention those in the developing world-just so you can have a neat and tidy reformist approach that doesn’t rock the boat.)
Everything is authoritarian
Ok…
Leaving this here for anyone else who got this far and feels confused:
Using wikipedia as a reference for political ideology is like asking W Bush which countries are good and bad
Hey, what about this tangentially-connected thing from 70 years ago?
Has anything changed in 70 years? The legacy of the suppression of the left wing in the United States is still with us today!
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name your favourite anti-authoritarian system. you wanna have a revolution to create it? whoopsie doopsie, you’re literally forcing people (maybe at gunpoint!!!) to do something that they don’t want to do, you fucking authoritarian tankie monster. next you’ll be saying you want to get rid of corporations (extremely authoritarian over those business owners)
No I don’t want a revolution, I want people to try to work together instead of fighting.
That’d be nice. Unfortunately the bourgeoise have class solidarity with each other and not with us, they will prevent change from happening peacefully.
Yeah, us too. Unfortuntely society is currently managed by a bunch of literal sociopaths who are more than willing to throw their stolen wealth into militarized police, private deathsquads, and good ol’ normal armies.
We dont get to dictate the escalation of force, the bourgeoisie have and will do that for us.
Seems like you’re missing a ton of nuance in manufacturing consent, and have turned from the frying pan into the fire in that sense.
Yes, Western media is biased towards corporations. This is most clearly seen in anything labeled “finance” or “money”, but is pervasive.
But the only time I can ever think of Western media doing anything on the scale of censoring the 1989 Tiananmin Square Massacre is the Iraq MWD debacle. And they’ve never done anything like the Great Firewall.
As a rule the US government does not mislead its own citizens the way Russia and China do.
And even if you’re 100% on board with every word Marx has written, I don’t understand how that leads one to defend modern day Russia and China.
The West absolutely has problems. And it’s good and right to point those out and try to fix them. But to try to paint the East as the answer to stand against the West is dangerous and dumb.
1989 Tiananmin Square Massacre
You know back in school years ago (the small amount I actually remember) I had a history teacher show us the tankman video and it just cut off with him standing there and my teacher said “the Chinese cut the film before it could leave the country” or something like that. Only more recently did I learn that was bullshit.
Good thing I had already figured most of the history classes were bullshit before that. Oh and having a school designed by someone who designs prisons really didn’t help my motivation.
And they’ve never done anything like the Great Firewall.
The great firewall is for your own protection, just look at how you guys react to a small group of users with different opinions!
Are people stupid enough to believe this?
The real answer is it is, among other things, an economic tool
The alternative was having the big US techs invade china economically, along with the mass propaganda from capitalist entities (chief among them the US, always pursuing efforts to destabilize China) that would have followed
You don’t speak to actual Chinese citizens often, do you ? basically all young people there have VPNs, and nobody cares. Like, at all
No, the truth is the CCP is a violently authoritarian government that needs to control what it’s citizens think in order to stay in power.
Be more direct. Who are you even replying to?
I’m not replying to anyone, I’m posting this for other people who come along and might be susceptible to Hexbear propaganda.
Well thank god they have you to tell them… what exactly? What counter-movement do you stand for?
It might shock you but you aren’t required to stand for an anti-establishment whatever and shove your opinions down other people’s throats.
Capitalism in it’s current form may be responsible for incredible suffering and truly horrific global environmental damage. That doesn’t mean the concept itself is 100% wrong, that Communism is compatible with human nature, or that it’s in humanities best interest to split of into a bunch of counter-movements.
Maybe sometime last week I noticed nearly every political post had at least one long thread of Hexbear users that do nothing but repeat CCP talking points while waving anyway anything even remotely reliable as Western propaganda.
Just curious, are you old enough to remember the media role in the run up to the Iraq War? The US media spread outright lies on behalf of the military industrial complex, to a degree that made it obvious to anyone watching once things started to go south after the war was well underway. It may not be quite as obvious these days as it was back then, but that kind of media manipulation is still very common. These days, you also have direct social media manipulation on top of that. In my opinion, it’s a terrible idea to accept the media narrative at face value, and you should at least consider other arguments and try to dig into the evidence a little more yourself instead of just saying someone is a shill. I think you’ll start finding the reality might be different than what you were initially led to believe.
Also on the topic of media manipulation, here is a GREAT video that everyone imo should watch: https://youtube.com/watch?v=2BO83Ig-E8E
Thanks for posting this. This is another great case that illustrates how western media manipulation happens.
It was absolutely not obvious at all to Americans back then. Or more accurately, they wanted to believe the lies so they did
73% of Americans were in favor of invading Iraq
Same thing happened in Vietnam. In fact, public opinion only really changed after the politicians started saying that it was ‘time to scale down US involvement’ or whatever, which only came years after many people in the Whitehouse realised the war was unwinnable. In the meantime, and despite all the famous protests and anti-war marches, the public was pretty happy to follow the official line that America was the good guy and that communism had to be stopped.
You could do an interesting analysis of this phenomenon using Gramsci’s idea of Cultural Hegemony as a framing device.
Some of us saw right through that shit immediately though
Not sure if I made it clear enough, but I meant it became more obvious once the war started going badly and the weapons of mass destruction had not turned up.
I don’t think that the CCP cares enough about Lemmy to make bots. Lmao.
We are a leftist community that has existed for about 3 years before we federated.
The stuff we believe and discuss are leftist talking points you would hear in any ML org.
Have you ever spoken to any actual, theory-reading leftists or have you only ever spoken to Neoliberal Democrat types? Because from a political science point of view, Dems are not leftists, they’re capitalists.
I swear we are not scary people, we are just really, really frustrated with the capitalist status quo and the liberal bullshitting some people use to defend it.
Bots are cheap, and Lemmy is growing. It would be foolish for them not to get in on this early.
You are right, of course, that leftism != liberalism. But just saying that doesn’t count as an argument. I haven’t yet seen what Menachem is complaining about, but I will be paying attention.
EDIT: On further read, you guys kind of feel at the very least like the left-wing equivalent of somethingawful.com.
On further read, you guys kind of feel at the very least like the left-wing equivalent of somethingawful.com.
Oh my God that’s genuinely so sweet
You can’t defederate, I’m the only person keeping !ohio@midwest.social and !cleveland@midwest.social active. The power and frequency of our posting is a boon to the rest of the Lemmyverse.
Your instance, along with exploding heads and lemmygrad, are ruining the fediverse. I’ve stopped recommending it to anyone because of people like you.
Here you are brigading
Midwest.Social, and you constantly push authoritarian propaganda throughout the fediverse.Lemmy was created by communists, with lemmygrad and hexbear being among the first to exist. Lemmygrad second instance after lemmy ml actually. Do you see us cry and stop recommending it because there are libs on our sites?
Actually yes I do, even though other people aren’t going around shoving propaganda down your throats… well aside from exploding heads and a couple smaller instances
brigading
You can take the redditor out of
but you can’t take the out of the redditorFuck nazis and fuck you.
So much for the tolerant left
I support human rights and I’m intolerant of Nazis and other authoritarians.
Oh you like human rights? Name three of their albums
They have a lot of good ones, but I’d say
- Tiananmen Square
- Tulsa Race Massacre
- Holodomor famine
Yeah so are we, you should come post on hexbear with us
Hexbear is absolutely full of authoritarian propaganda from the Kremlin and CCP.
If hexbear was actually what it pretends to be I’d probably love it.
We are not brigading. We’re just extremely online and this post came into our feed like it did yours. Are we not allowed to comment on posts in our feed?
“Brigading”
Learn how federation works, or better yet, go back to reddit.
I know how it works, go back to your fork.
Your account isnt from the midwest.social instance either…
No kidding, instances and forks are completely different things.
Go back to yours, brigader
Turns out YOU should learn how federation works, maybe you can do that after you learn how to stop shoving your propaganda down other people’s throats.
you’re currently “brigading” a thread in your non-native instance about how rude it is that liberals aren’t allowed to spread their right-wing propaganda uncontested
every accusation a confession
Bullshit
This post appeared on my feed. That’s the only reason I’m here. Get used to not being popular. This isn’t Reddit. No one is going to protect you from not encountering leftists.
Of course it did…
Coping that your instance isn’t as active as ours lol
I don’t care how active my instance is, I’ll probably move to another one soon anyway. I just hate authoritarian propaganda.
bro the United States has the largest prison population in the world and regularly overthrows countries they don’t like, the US is by far the most authoritarian country in the world by any sensible definition
I thought Hexbear users didn’t assume gender.
the US is by far the most authoritarian country in the world by any sensible definition
Do you even look up what these words mean? The US has some considerable authoritarian issues, but it’s way more democratic than many other countries.
Also why are we suddenly talking about the US, are you just reading from the script or what?
Your instance, along with exploding heads
BOTH SIDES
They’re not “both sides” they’re both extremist communities filled with hate and misinformation.
both extremist communitie
Literally opposite sides of the political spectrum dude. This is the literal definition of both sidesing.
hate
Yeah uh huh wanting to do genocide to minorities is the same thing as posting pig poop balls when liberals support western imperialism.
You aren’t a “side” you’re a small group of angry, useful idiots and bots. If you want to talk about genocide, let’s talk about the current genocide the CCP is carrying out.
let’s talk about the current genocide the CCP is carrying out
The one the UN can find no evidence of ?
Not reading your propaganda, I’m actively trying to get hexbear admins to block me.
We’ve been here for 3 years, before 99% of lemmitors even knew what a Lemmy was. Chapo trap house got banned from reddit, so we made a site here. Our site’s code diverged from og Lemmy so we could add things like pronoun tags, and only recently had been made into a version compatible with federation. We’ve had time to make our own site culture of posting, whereas the rest of lemmitors are fresh off of reddit. Being suspicious of hexbear posting a lot after federation is like being suspicious of water flowing after a dam bursts.
Seriously just click on the profiles of every pisspants liberal complaining about us and the longest they’ve been on the site is usually 2 months.
American tourists rolling in and demanding everything be how they like it.
The way they tell it, you’d think everything from DW, to Fox, to Propublica, to straight up AP News articles, are all written by the same people.
They are, it’s called the capitalist class.
And your information is incorrect, hexbear is one of the oldest Lemmy instances, and we’ve always been among the most active. My account is over 3 years old. It’s just that we only federated recently.
Ah yes, the classic wealthy journalist. Everyone knows that reporting is where the big bucks truly lie. I guess it’s impossible for literally anyone living anywhere but the like 3 countries that pretend to be communist to report on anything accurately.
who pays the journalists? who sets editorial policy? who prevents the journalists from unionizing?
Ford Foundation Carnegie Corporation
Lmao you just owned yourself with this link. I love when libs link wikipedia links they havent actually read.
Oh shit, a Wikipedia page.
Stalin defeated fascism
That’s the main reason why nationalist chauvinists like OP hate Stalin.
So many visible pronouns to upbear in this thread.
Yeah I’m just going through blocking all of them. I don’t have anything against pronouns but I figure 99% of them are tankies so it’s a pretty efficient filter.
🔒 award baby
So glad this thread could become such a perfect microcosm of why we need to defederate.
You asked about us. We came out in force to answer you. Why is that surprising or evidence of anything? We don’t have a downvote feature, so we’re used to responding when we disagree. And of course we’re going to defend ourselves.
Its so funny how you guys became so used to being able to live in an echo chamber of western capitalist propaganda on reddit, then moved here, then had that bubble popped by us and lemmygrad, then became INCREDIBLY DESPERATE to get away from opinions you previously were sheltered from. Its just a funny reaction to witness. Meanwhile, liberalism is something I can never really escape. Because its everywhere. I dont actually have the option to completely unplug.
Anyway, if your instance defeded lemmygrad I have no doubt you’ll get your way with us sooner rather than later.
I just noticed them today when a post from their community reached my front page. They called my server, lemm.ee, which is just a neutral general Lemmy instance, a racist neo lib instance and should be defederated. No idea what’s up with them but I did notice them show up out of nowhere.
edit: oh this thread definitely convinces me they’re a toxic as hell lemmygrad 2.0. Luckily there’s a Lemmy PR that allows instance blocking. It’s just being tested right now and then will be merged.
Well, when they announced they were intending to federate, the entire comment section of the post about it was people planning to disrupt other instances. That’s their goal entirely.
Honestly, federation with Hexbear has improved my Lemmy experience 1000%. I think it would be silly to defederate because a vocal minority of libs don’t like their worldview to be challenged. You can individually block the instance if you don’t appreciate the vibe.
As far as I can tell they embrace leftist unity which is something we could all use more of.
As far as I can tell they embrace leftist unity which is something we could all use more of.
not to mention that a lot of well-meaning libs simply need to cross the mental barrier of “liberal bourgeois democracy = the end of history” to end up on our side. they recognize, on some level, many of the basic problems of capitalism but lack the analytical tools and deprogramming to effectively criticize it.
if exposure to leftist views outside the mainstream gets someone, anyone, to realize that smugly whining about “tankies” on the computer does exactly 0 good for improving their own material conditions, I’d say we’ve done our part
I always get really frustrated seeing the same places that hate cops openly and will outright say ACAB, and pro-queer and other good things, also spreading western propaganda about bad countries. Its like, man, if you could just get over this ONE hurdle.
Easy to admit their country is shit. Harder to admit their country is worse than the Asians’
