@[email protected] banned me from [email protected] (permanently!) and removed my comment from the post, because I dared to note that there are protests in Iran and shared a link to a crimethinc article with voices from within Iran. They call it “imperialist propaganda” if leftist voices from within Iran are distributed.
My comment:
I get it that the western media narrative is incredibly one-sided, focused on ideological bogeymen and focused on getting the monarch back in power. But I’d like to point out that there is in fact quite massive repression going on against the protestors. Leftist orgs in Iran need international solidarity now.
Their “reasoning”:
reason: Ignoring the post to spam imperialist propaganda
I don’t think that person can be reasoned with if they call crimethinc imperialist propaganda, so I’m not getting my hopes up for them lifting the ban.
I also think that they might be a bit butthurt, because I called out their zionistic worldview (i.e.: that judaism equates zionism) a few days ago.
PTB - Power Tripping Bots
This seems like the normal ideological purging that takes place in any externally managed echochamber.
Remember, data scientists have proven that around 30% of all posts and comments leading up to the US election in 2020 were from automated accounts managed by threat actors linked to Russia, Qatar, Iran, Saudi Arabia, etc.
Those same data analysis tools indicate that in the post-LLM era bot traffic has grown 10x since then.
We know that the strategy of these groups is to occupy, support and promote the most extreme positions on any topic.
It stands to reason that these same threat groups are active on Lemmy and that should make you INCREDIBLY skeptical when you encounter an account/community/instance that displays extreme ideology. You’re never going to win an argument with them, because they’re not people who are trying to defend a position… they’re trying to make sure that anybody reading will only see their
positionpropaganda.This is done by using multiple accounts to post comments along with a brigade of cheap throwaway accounts which can be used for vote manipulation. It doesn’t matter if you make a devastating argument that clearly shows the OP/commentor is wrong if you’re buried under downvotes so nobody sees your comment.
This also extends to communities/subreddits.
An easy example that most people on the left are familiar with: r/conservative . It’s very clearly not an organic subreddit made up of a random assortment of the population, the comment section is so heavily pruned that you think Reddit is broken when you click ‘show 28 more comments’ and there is nothing there. If you post there with any comment that doesn’t imply your tongue is tickling Trump’s duodenum you will be banned very quickly.
I look at any instance that houses these extreme opinions in the same way. While I’m sure there are real actual human people who arrived at their position on their own and hold some of the ideas being promoted there, I’m equally sure that there are a huge amount of the ‘people’ and moderators are operating in bad faith if not outright maliciousness.
Benn Jordan on YT (music/DIY tech youtuber, not a political content creator) lays a lot of this out, with citations: https://youtu.be/GZ5XN_mJE8Y
Not sure if I’m ready to assume/accept that. But good video and good to keep in mind. Thanks.
It’s an odd situation that we’re in where everyone understands that social media is swarming with bots and also are mostly unwilling to believe that it is affecting the social media that they personally use.
I don’t think that lemmy is a big enough target for that, frankly. It’s not like this is Twitter, instagram, bluesky or Facebook.
On the scale of intelligence agencies it requires very, very few resources to pay some minimum wage call center workers to manage moderator/admin accounts on every social media site where they’re capable of creating such accounts.
We know for a fact that they use Telegram channels, population around 80-100k, to push content. It doesn’t seem a stretch to think they’d be interested in communities on Lemmy with similarly sized userbases.
I mean, it could also just be people who have been conditioned by social media to be primed for outrage and self-righteousness or a mod having a bad day.
That being said, if there are bots on social media (and we know there are), where they would want to be and what they would want to be doing? Hosting a far left instance (or far right instance) is on brand as is forming an echo chamber by purging non-aligned members.
It may not be a duck, but it’s sure quacking and eating a lot of peas