In the past week I’ve been absolutely roasted for criticising two different countries. Normally I’d be okay with that, I can handle a mild toasting and after all debate is a good thing.
On both occasions though I was flamed for mentioning human rights issues that are established facts and have been known for many, many years. I was critical of the actions/laws of their governments and not the people, their race, religion, general political ideology or nationality.
On both occasions I was bombarded by long posts that parroted propaganda, and in the case of one country I was told (on multiple occasions) that I was ignorant, racist and even fascist for mentioning the issues I did. I’m not complaining about how I was treated, but as a reminder, I was discussing internationally-recognised human rights concerns that can be verified and based in fact.
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, and I think their purpose was to quiet negative talking points about the countries that were mentioned.
Has anyone else had a similar experience?
As everyone else has said, there is definitely this issue on Lemmy, when criticising China and Russia especially. Happened to me a few times. It’s weird.
I once did a test to see if the bias was really that bad and commented on a relevant news article on .ml something like “fuck Putin. Russia is committing war crimes in Ukraine” maybe with a couple of extra similar phrases. Comment deleted by mods with no explanation. Insane.
This is a common suggestion. I can see why people say it, but I just find it hard to believe people are really spending time here to do that. Wouldn’t you just go to reddit? What, do you want to convert the trekkies and Linux evangelists?
I think it’s much scarier than that: some people are just fucking nuts
See to me it makes perfect sense and is kind of genius. Lemmy tends to be left-leaning anyway. Its a rich pool of people who you could convert to your far-left idiologies with a few “fuck MAGA”'s and “here’s our awesome high-speed trains, our country is a utopia”. Idea being those converts go on to do the work for you elsewhere.
I guess! Possibly high effort, low reward but it could work I suppose.
But I still think they’re just people after this stage. Lots of people become communist on their own as well. You don’t need to glaze China to do it but it probably creates a bit of cognitive dissonance to see how awful it is there. So you ignore stuff like the uyghurs and pretend it’s amazing so you can pretend communism will work.
I was being insulted and flamed on an ml instance when I posed China isn’t my friend like the USA government. I reported the offending posts and was banned because I made mention these tankies seem angry over Taiwan. It’s a cesspit, disregard it.