And we welcome our new peons

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hi comrade we love you fr

We’re not overlords we’re just comrades in arms

who pays the journalists? who sets editorial policy? who prevents the journalists from unionizing?

The idea that media companies in the the west are subservient to the interests of capital and the military industrial state isn’t even a “tankie” take on the left. Similar ideas have been espoused by many people across the left, the most famous of which being Manufacturing Consent by Noam Chomsky.

the like 3 countries that pretend to be communist

You sound like an immensely condescending chauvinist. Does Cuba not live up to your very informed view on communism?

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Like have you never had a job before? Like if you’re gonna accuse people of being out of touch, stop buying $10 bananas

I’m glad there are liberals like you around to tell us communists who is really communist

Is the executive of the media company that owns the news outlet also a journalist? Is the financial conglomerate that owns the media company as well as the missile company, also a journalist? Come on, you must have thought at least once in your life about this actually existing hierarchy of capitals and how it influences what news gets published and who gets to work as a journalist.

Ah yes, the classic wealthy journalist.

Do the journalists you read personally hand their writings to you? Or is there some intermediary that gets them to you, some wealthy entity that handles the publishing of those writings?

Ah yes, the classic wealthy journalist.

Ah yes, the classic wealthy Amazon worker. Everyone knows that having a logistics and retail monopoly is where the big bucks truly lie.

Obviously because the lowest level worker in this industry is not wealthy themselves, it means that suggesting the industry as a whole is both owned and serves the interests of entrenched power and wealth IS BIG DUMB LOL

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class is about your relationship to the means of production, not your income

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

I’m explaining, not arguing.

Bots are cheap, and Lemmy is growing. It would be foolish for them not to get in on this early.

All I can say is I’m not a bot. What you want to believe is up to you.

If you want to take the issue of social media manipulation seriously, you need to take a moment to consider who is best positioned and best motivated to carry out these operations. The vast majority of the English-speaking social media platforms are headquartered in Silicon Valley, domiciled in the US. This includes TikTok. Despite all the hippie California Ideology bullshit, the Valley has been closely linked with the Pentagon since its inception (See Palo Alto by Malcom Harris, or Surveillance Valley by Yasha Levine as two examples of this history.) Today, these giant tech firms still live off the teat of military contracts. From Microsoft to Google to Amazon.

The social media platforms enjoy a regime of immense power and nil regulations. There are a lot of ways the state could cause these companies pain if it were interested, from rescinding contracts to imposing regulation, to engaging in some bona fide anti-trust litigation, but this doesn’t happen because they have an understanding. These companies collaborate with the state in surveillance, they install figures like Jessica Ashooh at Reddit - straight out of the Atlantic Council - to run moderation policy. They facilitate counterinsurgency by sweeping up disclosures like the Blue Leaks and shutting down dissident communities in the midst of large scale civil unrest. They flood these platforms with war propaganda when it is convenient, lay the seeds of doubt whenever US interests are challenged abroad. They allow floods of fake users to post positively about US-aligned coups like the one in Bolivia, or the SOSCuba nonsense. We literally have military formations who’s sole task is to manipulate opinion on social media.

These are the people manipulating public opinion on social media. They are the ones holding the keys to the platforms. The ones who DECIDE what the algorithm is going to show you day after day after day. The ones who let shitholes like r/The_Donald to run roughshod for years, then ban communities like r/ChapoTrapHouse in the middle of the biggest domestic protest movement in US history. The ones who remove moderators from places like r/PresidentialRaceMemes and replace them with ideologues from r/Neoliberal to ensure the website closes ranks against the most underwhelming candidate and political vision conceivable for the moment.

Seriously consider the power held by the people operating these platforms. What they believe. What their material interests are. Who they network with. Who they do business with. What constraints exist to severely punish them if they undermine the interests of state. Consider that, and balance that against the overblown panic about foreign influence bots. Which one do you think has a bigger impact?

States are massive, chaotic social systems. I’m not going to say that foreign influence ops don’t occur, because within each state there are competing factions with different interests. But consider China is much more concerned with domestic conditions within their country than they are about what a bunch of Redditors, who they have blocked, think about them anyway. Consider the same about Russia. Consider the disparity in power these countries have to manipulate infrastructure owned and operated in the United States compared to the people who actually own it, and the state agencies which have the jurisdiction to destroy these firms if they step out of line.

first and second off lmfao

third off yeah im pretty sure a plurality of users here are veterans in their late 20s to early 30s of the mid-2000s cultural miasma

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There’s definitely a lot of SomethingAwful influence in our culture. /R/chapotraphouse, the subreddit whose banning spawned our website, had a ton of that energy too.

It would be foolish for them not to get in on this early

China has never been very good at English soft power projection

it do smell like :10bux: in here

But to Complicated for th West to use , CIA simply doesnt have the Budget… Only Iran does !

Hard to be inclusive when the response to almost anything and everything is to call someone a “shitlib” and dip, unless you mean inclusively exclusive by insulting everyone.

When you live in a society where then entirety of mainstream discourse is between one side rainbow-washing carpetbombers and the other side calling that rainbow-washing evidence of an evil queer agenda, it sure should look like anyone repeating mainstream talking points is a shitlib.

What really puts the nail in that coffin, though, is the very extreme support Hexbear has for China, unless, again, you are comfortable denying everyone basic human rights so it’s considered inclusive.

Sticking to the queer topic, this is like when people used to concern troll about Cuba because it had laws in the '70s that were as homophobic as the typical western country, but that has become more difficult in the last few years as it has taken up – to my knowledge – the most progressive, inclusive family code in the world.

China right now is perhaps slightly behind the average western country in this respect, but there is a clear positive trend.

Supporting China is normal and good. Sorry there aren’t any mods here to make it seem like your bazinga brain views are popular.

Ok, which HumanRights ™️ are we talking about?

idk i’m a trans lesbian and i have been on hexbear for 3 years and never been insulted or made to feel unwelcome on account of my identity a single time

now if by “inclusive” you mean “tolerant of right-wing bullshit” then no, we’re not, and we never will be

Hard to be inclusive if you let bigoted shitlibs do their thing without pushback .

Hard to be inclusive when the response to almost anything and everything is to call someone a “shitlib” and dip, unless you mean inclusively exclusive by insulting everyone.

As a trans woman, i’ve never felt safe in liberal spaces, and the reason for that is largely debatebro shitheads like you who violently fight back against anything that challenges your notion of living in the best of all possible worlds, which reliably happens to include my own experiences with and thoughts on transphobia, mysogyny, classism and other forms of structural oppression and their intersections. Anytime i’ve done that in public online spaces that aren’t exclusively trans, i’ve been browbeaten, called into doubt and silenced. I’ve never had that on hexbear. Let’s not even begin with the fact that i’ve never had to explain to a hexbear mod what constitutes transphobia because half of the mod team is trans themselves, or that pronoun tags are mandatory, or that we’ve systematically banned anybody making a fuss about either of that.

Hexbear has actually put in the work to be a queer-inclusive space. And it has done that precisely by being brutally intolerant and absolutely belligerent to queerphobes instead of doing the liberal thing of empty gestures of tolerance while upholding the status quo that maims us. Meanwhile, anything you’ve ever done on lemmy is posting passive-aggressive one-liners and anti-communist garbage. Go fuck yourself.

lol ”basic human rights”

I bet you’re over on fantasizing about grinding homeless people into a slurry right now.

We are explicitly anti liberalism given that it supports an inherently discriminatory economic system (capitalism).

I’m a bisexual trans girl whose found this space to be the most accepting space I’ve ever been in on the internet (including many exclusively trans spaces).

Also many of us are not as pro China as we seem from the outside, I’m a lot more critical of china than many of the other hexbear users and we have a decent number of anarchists who post here, however we close ranks against imperialist narratives pushing for a right wing coup of the Chinese government because regardless of our differing ideologies we all agree that would be awful for the Chinese people.

Inclusive of marginalized groups, not liberalism

Lifting 800 million people out of poverty is denying them human rights, damn Europe must be a gulag compared to that

Hexbear is the most inclusive instance. If it’s hard to be inclusive then we’re just fucking great at it

Its possible for us to disagree about china without ripping each others heads off, I’ve been doin it for years

Hard to be inclusive when the response to almost anything and everything is to call someone a “shitlib” and dip, unless you mean inclusively exclusive by insulting everyone.

Gonna need to second the other posters pointing out that as a trans person this is by far the most queer inclusive space I’ve ever been on the internet. I’ve been around for 3 years because it’s actually a breath of fresh air scrolling through interactions between people without having to tolerate the high baseline misogyny and hitler particles present in the rest of the internet.

Getting called on the specific shit they’re doing:

“you just accuse everyone of [the shit I’m doing]!”