And unfortunately lemmy.ml is getting more online traffic recently.
this post was submitted on 01 Sep 2024
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Lemmy.ml is run by people who spread authoritarian propaganda, most likely the CCP. It's a real stain on Lemmy and people shouldn't support or legitimize it in any way.
What kind of source can I offer? Photocopies of internal CCP propaganda documents? This isn't the kind of thing you can link to a research journal to prove.
The CCP has always relied heavily on propaganda, and is obviously investing on it internationally with things like Tik Tok.
The Fediverse is an easy, easy target. They run their own instance and set their own rules, and there's absolutely no budget and basically no coordination whatsoever to counter disinformation.
I sincerely doubt that a covert arm of the Chinese propaganda machine would label themselves as Marxist-Leninist.
Why not? Socialism and Anarchy are both very popular among the fringe groups and youth demographics they're trying to persuade into subterfuge. They're also targeting LGBT.
Go over to Hexbear or Lemmygrad and you can clearly see tons of pro-China and pro-Russia (more specifically Pro-Jinping and Pro-Putin) posts all hours of the day, and all of it is constantly flooding into the instances that federate with them.
Yeah, it's honestly been really disappointing to me to see the general apathy towards all the propaganda on here
I'd love to recommend the fediverse to friends, the idea is incredible
They stoke extremist political views in their "enemies" societies while also spreading propaganda. Its a facade
It's an easy target but also a near worthless one. What does the CCP gain from getting a bunch of terminally online Linux nerds on their side? No one making real decisions that could effect China is on here.
4chan is also a soft target but you don't see parties or governments investing in propagandizing there because it's full of basement dwelling incels who can't do anything besides maybe shoot up a school.
there are almost certainly people propagandizing on chans, especially 4chans /pol/ as it has a fairly large user base and has proven to be very influential with dozens (or more) of academic papers written about its culture and dynamics.
https://firstmonday.org/ojs/index.php/fm/article/download/11075/11269/83226 this paper shows trends in pol posting surrounding major news events (mass shootings). Specifically after the Pittsburgh shooting they see a significant change of a small number of pro trump links circulated hundreds of times immediately in the aftermath, more so than before the incident. There are similar papers and many more describing the culture to help potential actors assimilate as quickly as possible
Again, the causal nature is impossible to prove (unless Hiroyuki starts leaking ips and they can be linked to someone somehow, I guess), but it appears someone(s) has been using that forum to make a concentrated effort to promote certain ideas, mainly pro trump propaganda and antisemitism.
Based on estimates 4chan gets anywhere from 20-60 million visitors per month. /pol/ alone sees well over 100-120k posts per day right now per 4stats.io, 4chans official stats. It’s by far one of the most active boards, running about the same as /vg/, dedicated to general gaming, and also full of bullshit but the whiny gamer kind (which is a well established pipeline to places like /pol/). whereas core 4chan boards like /b/ (random, the original board, where kind of anything goes), and /a/ (anime, probably the earliest board once it split from just /b/ for everything) being the next most active see barely half this, 40-50k posts per day.
Basically /pol/ sees a massive amount of discussion from a giant group of angry impressionable (often young but not always) people who are absolutely willing to campaign, make and spread memes, flood comment sections, etc. you’re foolish if you think that’s not being astroturfed and botted by people with vested interests. like is the trump campaign directly doing it? Probably not, but is one of their pacs kicking some money to some stormfront dudes who are? Maybe. It could also potentially be some weird trump group that spams and is otherwise unaffiliated with the campaign of course. That’s still propaganda, it’s just not sanctioned “officially”.
And this was touched on but the /pol/ influence is seen throughout the boards as well. They’ll spout their talking points on the videogame boards as mentioned like /v/, /vg/, etc to pull in gullible people but also the anime board (/a/), even slow boards like do it yourself (/diy/) which sees like 400 posts a day will get posts about immigration impacting trade jobs as a way to shoehorn in the typical rhetoric
In comparison according to fedidb lemmy has a bit under 400k users (a bit over 1/10th active, around 45k) and a bit over 8 million posts. That’s a footnote compared to 4chan which itself is dwarfed by the giants like reddit, facebook, etc that see monthly visitor counts in the billions. Of the fediverse mastodon would make the most sense to astroturf as it has significantly more users and posts. Unless they see serious growth potential and want to establish trust early on the platform, which would make sense I suppose, but looking at lemmys growth charted out that could be a very long wait for a return on investment. While posting is free paying people/bots to post isn’t. But perhaps they’re hoping it will become like /pol/, a niche forum on the internet that has decent enough traffic to become surprisingly influential. I do think this is unlikely, but who the fuck am I?
Of course, the statistics are not fully accurate here for either. 4chans traffic is estimated and sources vary pretty wildly, 4chans post counts should be accurate as that does come from 4chan. fedidb info is accurate but iirc doesn’t necessarily include all instances. That said it’s unlikely there’s an a few instances that would wildly skew the data and most estimates for 4chans traffic are on the higher end of 40-50 million visitors per month
Seriously, that's buck wild. I hope they meant "they support the CCP", which isn't a stretch given the various Soviet-era iconography in the profiles of its maintainers (Mao, Castro, Gagarin, etc.), and not "they're acting on behalf of the CCP", which is such a ridiculous claim to make with no further substantiation.
Spend some time browsing through the instances communities.
It is well known that that both the main devs of Lemmy (whose home instance is Lemmy.ml) are ~~communists~~ socialists who side with the ideals of China (CCP). Also, it may be less known that the .ml is short for Marxist/Leninist or Marx/Lenin. Either way, it’s a hat tip to ~~communism~~ socialism.
They are known for being heavy-handed with post/comment removal and bans of opposing views of any kind. Viewing their mod log would attest to that.
It's really easy to demonstrate. Ask them for an alternative to Harris/Trump and they'll run around in circles to not give you a candidate and then tell you voting doesn't work.
I’d like to apologize that you felt my response was dismissive. I certainly did not intend to make anybody feel that way. I didn’t have any specific examples to give, so I approached it from an anecdotal point of view based on my personal experiences.
If it means anything to you, my responses were not meant as accusations or attacks. Merely observations of the things I’ve personally seen. But I can appreciate your view of things, and I respect that you may disagree.
Does it matter who is doing it? Social media is rife with propaganda ever since r/the_donald was such a successful operation.
There are no volunteers that respond as quickly and consistently as r/t_d mods did. Anything counter to the narrative would be removed within seconds, at any time of day
Minor correction: tankies aren't communists.
Now that you mention it, I just realized I meant socialism and not communism. Thank you.
They aren't socialists either. Socialists want workers to own the means of production. MLs want the state to control the means of production. The two are inherently incompatible.
True though I’d give them props for accepting correction and actually thanking the source of it.
If everyone behaved that way, online spaces would be far less toxic and misinformation wouldn’t spread so easily.
You're right; I was insufficiently friendly with my response.
All good brother
Lol "You can just tell"
"most likely" it's an opinion, so evidence not required.
If they said "it is run by ccp" then you may have a point.
Don't play sophist games.
That might be an opinion (it's not, "most likely" means they aren't sure about a claim, not that the claim is an opinion), but even if it were if would be completely wrong. Lemmy.ml is, after all, owned by Dessalines, one of the creators of Lemmy, afaik does not live in China.
.ml is definitely a pretty authoritarian instance though and denying the Uyghur genocide in China seems to be a pretty common take there.
Those same people are also the lead developers of lemmy.
Exhibit A of the original dev’s moderation style
Fuck that guy, best thing he did was make Lemmy open source so it can grow beyond their tiny little world view
Lol, you go and shit in someone's house and then get upset that they kicked you out.
Using Lemmy in general pretty much is legitimizing lemmy.ml's admin work though...
The thing about open source software, no one person gets the credit for it. Especially since the Reddit exodus there have been more and more contributors.