Unpopular Opinion
Welcome to the Unpopular Opinion community!
How voting works:
Vote the opposite of the norm.
If you agree that the opinion is unpopular give it an arrow up. If it's something that's widely accepted, give it an arrow down.
Guidelines:
Tag your post, if possible (not required)
- If your post is a "General" unpopular opinion, start the subject with [GENERAL].
- If it is a Lemmy-specific unpopular opinion, start it with [LEMMY].
Rules:
1. NO POLITICS
Politics is everywhere. Let's make this about [general] and [lemmy] - specific topics, and keep politics out of it.
2. Be civil.
Disagreements happen, but that doesn’t provide the right to personally attack others. No racism/sexism/bigotry. Please also refrain from gatekeeping others' opinions.
3. No bots, spam or self-promotion.
Only approved bots, which follow the guidelines for bots set by the instance, are allowed.
4. Shitposts and memes are allowed but...
Only until they prove to be a problem. They can and will be removed at moderator discretion.
5. No trolling.
This shouldn't need an explanation. If your post or comment is made just to get a rise with no real value, it will be removed. You do this too often, you will get a vacation to touch grass, away from this community for 1 or more days. Repeat offenses will result in a perma-ban.
6. Defend your opinion
This is a bit of a mix of rules 4 and 5 to help foster higher quality posts. You are expected to defend your unpopular opinion in the post body. We don't expect a whole manifesto (please, no manifestos), but you should at least provide some details as to why you hold the position you do.
Instance-wide rules always apply. https://legal.lemmy.world/tos/
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It's important to call out the massive influx of Kremlin and CCP propaganda on social media, and it's all over the place on Lemmy.
Yeah. I mean, they're all over social media but holy crap do they own on Lemmy...
Yeah, it's honestly a real bummer. I'd love to encourage people to use the Fediverse, but I won't even tell people I use it as it is.
Same here. It's a serious problem right now
I mean, the original creators of Lemmy are Communists. Not my opinion; they stated that much themselves. Despite their claim that their team comes from a bunch of political ideologies, lemmy.ml is very pro-Communism, and a breeding ground for pro-Russia/China and anti-Ukraine/America content.
I'm confused, they're pro-communism but Russia isn't communist and it's a stretch to call China a strictly communist, Marxist nation.
I don't know enough about the developers of Lemmy, but in a general sense I know a lot of the pro-Russia/China stances from tankies are simply because they are the biggest anti-West powers. What they do in practice doesn't matter as much as their ability to challenge Western standards.
In essence, it's like people who support certain political candidates for being "accelerationists" or "disruptors" just because they want to see the system burn, and they're narcissistic enough to think their ideology will somehow be the one on top after the collapse.
Ideologues with a very flexible ideology? So just hypocrites really.
Sounds about right.
There are some real communists there, but it's more of a facade for Kremlin and CCP propaganda.
Fwiw I'm fine with the real communists, it's a noble ideology that at the very least provides an important counterbalance for late stage capitalism. But I hate lemmy.ml and their ilk for supporting the spread of authoritarians.
Same, communism would be a great way to go about things if people weren't involved but they are and the ones that rise to power often absolutely fucking suck.
I don't see much in the way of obvious pro-CCP and pro-Putin propaganda around here though, I see way more posts calling it out. Maybe my instance has blocked the worst offenders, I don't know.
Lemmy.world is defederated from Hexbear and Lemmygrad, which are the two most cited tankie instances. Several other instances are defederated from them as well, though I don't know them all off the top of my head.
There are other instances which remain federated with them, however, and so they may see more posts from those instances as well as potentially dramatically different comment sections with Hexbear/Lemmygrad users who are otherwise invisible to those from instances that defederated from them.
Ah, makes sense. Thanks!
It's not obvious, they know subtlety is required, and the core of most propaganda is truthful.
Something to look for is content that divides the enemies of the Kremlin/CCP (often the same). Digital divide and conquer, fueled by paid shills and LLMs.
Some examples are:
They also more directly attack political opponents. They can't constantly say "Putin is great," it's too obvious. But they attack people.
Biden is an obvious example because they want their asset Trump to win, and an interesting example because they're also focusing on Israel and BLM as wedge issues against Biden... the Kremlin really wants Trump to win so they can steal land and control people in eastern Ukraine.
It's not limited to economics. They're pro Russia and anti West. I got banned from a ml community for saying NATO is a defensive pact.
Someone should tell them it's entirely possible to be critical of Western governments without sucking authoritarian dick.
Yeah, it's like saying North Korea is a democracy because their government says it's a democracy.
If someone says Russia or China are communist, you don't need to listen to anything else they're saying. Regardless of.if they're talking about how great or how terrible either of those countries are.
Inb4 deluge
And oddly.the angriest ML based folks seem to log in overnight US time.
Apply that to USA propaganda.
I do.
Ok comrade.
Zero self awareness is not a good look.
What about a sprinkling of whataboutism?