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.
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.
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.
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.
Same type of person. Careerist strivers who all accept the basic liberal version of history and society. The liberal version of history coincides with the reactionary version of history because they both refuse to question the premises of capitalism. That is they both agree more over capitalism and Western Hegemony more than they disagree about specific cultural issues. They don’t all have to be in the same room, coordinating on a narrative because they all share the same boundaries of inquiry. So the same kind of stuff gets written without active coordination. This is a roundabout way to say they’re all of the same class. They have class solidarity.
A liberal news source will talk about how good and downtrodden immigrants are. A conservative news source will talk about how all immigrants are drug dealers. But they don’t disagree that there both needs to be immigration or that it needs to be regulated. A good real world example of this is Democrats flipping out over Trump’s racism and then upping funding for “border security” and advocating for a tech wall. Neither question the fundamental assumptions about immigration. Both advocate for the same idea, just in different abstractions. Nobody actually thinks the person who writes a bleeding heart article gets up from their chair and sits at a different desk where they write about caravans of cartel members. Though you do get the same person/organization drifting into sounding like their opposition, like the NYT. Which illustrates, again, that they’re the same class and ultimately share the same goals and fears.
It’s not a hard code to crack. You just have to be willing to actually question things and be curious. But there’s a lot of resentment in doing that (displayed here) because part of the media is propagandizing poor people and getting them adopt the same goals and fears as the upper classes. The people in government right now spent decades selling off your jobs and livlihood to cheaper areas of the world. Because it benefited them. One of those places was China. Capitalists gave China everything they needed to become what they are. It was fun when sowing. Now, because of problems in the West, China must become a talking point and scapegoat. The rich don’t like them because they’re closing themselves off from foreign investment and they’re not playing ball with our foreign policy. That is they pose a threat to unite with other countries and close off investment as well. If US companies can’t set up shop in Taiwan, for example, that hurts wealthy people in the US. You don’t have that wealth or investment so that argument won’t work on you. Therefore the problem must be abstracted and layered under a bunch of cultural or moral arguments. So you get stories about how the Chinese are all savage bug people who work like robots to overthrow your way of life. They’re violating your liberal ideals of free speech. They’re detaining Muslims so they’re too racist. They don’t like LGTBT people. They ruin your bitcoin gambling. They kill their people by cooking in sewage oil and their buildings fall down.
This is to get you to share opposition to China so that by the time we work ourselves into a War, you won’t really question why your children are fighting in it. They’ll go die so that US companies can keep pumping out resources from those countries and keep the competition out. All the sentiments about honor and duty and security and freedom are a lie.
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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.
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
Exception in thread "main" IllegalArgumentException: 23 at parseLlamaTokens.main(parseLlamaTokens.java:28)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 honestly not sure if I mean that as a compliment or not. They’re exactly what it says on the tin, but you can’t deny they’re an effective bunch.
It’s kind of an ironic thing to say these days considering how many leftists there are on SA.
Yeah, I lurk their tg boards to read tongue in cheek white wolf rpg reviews and I can think of at least one fairly prolific poster who is definitely some kind of socialist, probably a communist.
I know literally nothing about the non-elfgames parts of the site though.
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.
Saving this one.
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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.
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I’m not saying you are a bot, merely that your argument is weak.
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will the debate pervertry never cease
She did a strawman, she did a no true Scotsman, she did an ad hominem
Purge yourself of this brain rot
But to Complicated for th West to use , CIA simply doesnt have the Budget… Only Iran does !
it do smell like :10bux: in here
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
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.
Yep, I also feel like many people have inserted their own reality of history where all the anti war protests and fraggings were because the Americans wanted to stop killing others
But if you actually read the sentiment from people back then, the seemingly strongest sentiment was to stop the war because too many Americans were coming back in body bags and American soldiers were heavily demoralized from the nightmarish conditions of guerilla warfare against the Vietnamese
They just didn’t want more Americans to die for a reason they’ve never been told about
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.
Thanks for posting this. This is another great case that illustrates how western media manipulation happens.
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We’re posters. We’re active.
Honestly if reading views that are different to your own in posts that reach the federation /all/ page is a problem why leave reddit? One of the best things about this place is it NOT being a bubble of liberal-only thought where people jerk each other off all the time. Have conversations with us, realise that we have evidence for everything we say. I’m happy to chat to anyone.
So many visible pronouns to upbear in this thread.
If the allowed spectrum of “leftist” discourse only ranges from free college over here to legal weed over there, there really isn’t that much to talk about.
There’s more to talk about, and yes argue over, if actual fucking leftists are talking beyond that narrow range of relatively inoffensive to
discussion topics.The smart way to keep people passive and obedient is to strictly limit the spectrum of acceptable opinion, but allow very lively debate within that spectrum – even encourage the more critical and dissident views. That gives people the sense that there’s free thinking going on, while all the time the presuppositions of the system are being reinforced by the limits put on the range of the debate.
Hexbear has been around for about 3 years and recently federated recently. I hope this clears up any confusion.
We don’t like libs around here bc y’all won’t abandon your genocidal ideology while pretending you know better
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Were you a redditor? If so, you might remember r/chapotraphouse getting banned - they had been quarantined for quite a while before that, so they were ready to migrate when the ban came down. Idk if Hexbear is the first/only place they went or just where most ended up, but it’s definitely the same vibe as the subreddit, with a little bit of discord thrown in with the emotes.
I will admit to being not the most observant person - especially as I’m in the process of switching medical providers right now, so I’m between ADHD prescriptions and definitely not as with it as I could be! - but when I poked my head in over there, I saw fellow anarchists posting, so I had consequently dismissed people saying they were churning out “CCP talking points.” It mostly seems to me they churn out bullying - for everyone to the right of Bernie Sanders (which I mostly approve of, or at least find amusing). And Pig Poop Balls, of course. What did I miss?
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here’s how Bernie can still win:
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stay in line!
The folks in front of me have been sleeping for like over two years straight but I’m gonna politely wait for them to wake up so I don’t ruin The Democratic Process (but they smelled awful for some reason for the first few months after falling asleep idk what that was all abt
)
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And his views on Israel, yikes
What do you mean? He is like the only senator that mentions Palestinians deserving human dignity.
Well, yeah if you use the rest of the US legislature as a baseline sure I guess he’s not bad
But in absolute terms?
Look, I hate Bernie too, but most of the people complaining about his stance on Israel are claiming in so many words that he’s a “Bad Jew” for not being as zionist as they are.
Maybe, honestly it’s been a while since I looked at it - maybe I’m misremembering.
it’s more his support for the rest of US foreign policy. his views on Palestine are fine.
Bernie is to the right of chester the cheetoh’s cheetah wrt to “Israel” which means it’s the gulag for him.
waaait what on earth did I miss
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Even our animal friends are tankies
Idk if Hexbear is the first/only place they went or just where most ended up
There was a discord server right at the start, but there was drama as there always is with discord and it quickly split into the discord group and the hexbear group basically as soon as the site went up. (this was like a week or two after the ban iirc)
A number of people use both
It was Just the server for a good few months before the lemmy came up right?
I thought so, but I joined July 29, 2020, and that was just a couple days after the site launched, as I recall. I got lucky and saw a post about it on
I couldn’t remember when CTH got banned, but I looked it up and it was June 29, 2020. So just under a month, I guess. I’m glad I missed the invitation to the discord though–every time I try to use that thing it just makes me sad and angry. It isn’t just not user-friendly, it’s designed to be actively hostile to people trying to use it, I swear.
Hey, have you ever noticed how people throw around these big words like “fascism” and “Social-Democracy”? I mean, who came up with these names anyway? It’s like they were playing a game of Scrabble and just decided to throw a bunch of letters together!
So, apparently, fascism is not just about tanks and military stuff. No, no, it’s like the cool kids’ club for the bourgeoisie. You know, those fancy folks who have all the money and power? Yeah, they’ve got this “fighting organization,” like a secret club with matching jackets or something. And get this, they need the active support of Social-Democracy.
Social-Democracy, now that’s a mouthful, isn’t it? It’s like if democracy and socialism had a baby, but they were only moderate parents. So, picture this: fascism is like the wild, rowdy sibling, and Social-Democracy is the one who’s trying to keep the peace and make sure no one breaks anything. But guess what? They’re secretly on the same team!
It’s like having a superhero and their sidekick, but the sidekick is actually the one keeping the superhero in check. Can you imagine Batman going all out, and Robin’s just like, “Whoa, slow down there, buddy. Let’s not destroy the whole city!” That’s Social-Democracy for you.
So, in this crazy world of politics, they’re saying that the bourgeoisie’s “fighting organization” can’t really win battles or run the show without Social-Democracy cheering them on. It’s like a tag team match where one guy does all the heavy lifting, and the other guy just stands on the sidelines, nodding like, “Yeah, you got this!”
I don’t know about you, but I’ve never thought of politics as a game of tug-of-war between fancy clubs and their moderate pals. It’s like the grown-up version of kids on the playground. “I’ll be the dictator, and you can be the reasonable mediator, deal?”
But hey, what do I know? I’m just a guy who can’t even figure out how to program my VCR. Yeah, remember those? So next time you hear these big words being thrown around, just remember, it’s like a secret club with a responsible sidekick. And isn’t that what life’s all about?
I’m going to pretend this is being asked in good faith because even if it’s not, there are people who probably are asking it in good faith.
Anyway, Hexbear has become visible recently because we began federating recently. The instance is not less than a month old, it’s more than three years old, although it wasn’t tracked by Fediverse Observer due to running on a forked version which had split from mainline Lemmy when the instance was created, which is why my account and many others have creation dates stretching back a relatively long way. Three years of posting on an instance made to replace a banned subreddit which had a lot of users is a recipe for having a lot of posts (shocking I know). If it looks to you like many of us have no comment history (or at least no comment history before a week or two ago), that’s the result of some quirk of federation. When viewing the same profiles on Hexbear, their full often multi-year long history is visible.
