MeanwhileOnGrad

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Meanwhile On Grad

Documenting hate speech, conspiracy theories, apologia/revisionism, and general tankie behaviour across the fediverse. Memes are welcome!

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Tankie talking point speedrun! F35s -> Gaza -> Biden and Hillary Clinton -> "successful counterterrorism operation in Xinxiang through education, job creation, peace and prosperity results" (ponder.cat)

submitted 3 days ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

6 comments fedilink hide all child comments

Check this link for context, the whole evolution of the conversation is the particularly funny part:

https://ponder.cat/post/2054411/2336210

I also have no idea what they mean talking about Xinxiang (a city in Henan Province) instead of what they and I obviously meant, Xinjiang. It's easy to write it down as a meaningless typo, but I'm a little bit surprised to see someone who is clearly pushing overt CCP propaganda making an "all those foreigner-letters are basically the same" Westerner mistake.

Maybe that's a strong argument that they are an honest proponent of this stuff (as well as obviously not real educated about the basics of what they're talking about), and not part of any CCP influence operation. I just thought it was interesting.

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[–] [email protected] 8 points 3 days ago* (last edited 3 days ago) (1 children)

Yeah.

It would also, if true, be a sadly anticlimactic answer for what was a lingering unresolved mystery for me:

https://ponder.cat/post/1411455/1610864

So this particular troll account mostly just posts pro-Russian (or anti-Western) gibberish, barely comprehensible, of the type you can see on display here. They don't even seem to care very much whether people even believe them, and certainly not enough to slow down and post anything all that coherent.

But for some reason, when the slrpnk moderators took some time out of their busy schedule deleting criticisms of Jill Stein, and deleted instead some comments criticizing a misleading green energy article, this person suddenly stepped out of their troll mode and started posting reasoned and detailed defenses of the slrpnk moderation team. Why did they do that? Why was that weird minor Lemmy-drama issue the thing that motivated this troll to slow down and try to make sense, and read the messages they were responding to and construct sensible arguments about them?

If they're just sort of mentally ill in a vaguely anti-Western sort of way, then I guess there doesn't have to be much of an answer. It can just be that stuff triggers in their brain and they get passionate about it and start typing. I still find it a little bit curious though.

Edit: Okay, I looked more. I think this person is a pro-Russian shill. The stuff they get truly passionate about is all anti-Ukraine stuff. They'll performatively serve up some salad about Gaza or Xinjiang when prompted, but their main focus is Russia (specifically Ukraine), and there is absolutely no way that any useful idiot is this impassioned and consistent about how important it is for us all to agree that Putin's Russia is the good guys.

From https://lemmy.ca/comment/14204276:

I know that demonic imbeciles (or paid shills) such as yourself will when Putin runs out of patience with evil, and nukes your mother, you will ask your ruler to force him to nuke your father too.

So we're left, again, with the question of why the only time they got calm and started really actually trying to talk to people persuasively, was on behalf of the slrpnk moderators in an unrelated-to-geopolitics random Lemmy drama event.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 21 hours ago (1 children)

Yeah that is strange, in a suspicious way. Is it the prop-pushing account of a mod? Is there some sort of actual move to infiltrate things as small as lemmy? Did they take their meds that day?

[–] [email protected] 3 points 20 hours ago (1 children)

It's definitely clear to me that there is some kind of organized pro-Russian and anti-Democrat shilling going on on Lemmy. How much, it's more or less impossible to know.

I was a little bit surprised that Lemmy is worth infiltrating, yes. I think it's possible that any social media with a presence in the thousands of people is worth the effort. It's not that strange. Any post on Facebook will have a limited reach, any post on Lemmy will have a limited reach, they're really not all that tremendously different. I've heard other random rumors of people speculating about particular details of how and why, but I think there is more or less no way to know. All I've really seen directly is occasional slip-ups of someone pretending to be American when they clearly are not, as well as the obvious pattern of super vocal accounts which push more or less nothing but one particular geopolitically-useful ideology.

From time to time I try to trap them in some sort of bot detection attempt, and it always fails. 🙂

And yes, I have no idea what the connection is between humanspiral and the slrpnk mods, or even if there is one. I just observed that one really weird event and it always sort of stuck in my mind. Also, some of the slrpnk mods were definitely very vigorous leading up to the election in posting "don't vote for Democrats" stuff and deleting anyone who tried to disagree with it.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 19 hours ago

I read a report on how a lot of tiny fora, and other sites with comment functions, were getting barraged with russian bot traffic. They use web scrapers to pick up on sites that have comment functions, of any kind, and that tells the bot network to start automated posting there. Often it is so strong they effectively DDOS a lot of these personally run places. However, this account doesn't feel like that. This leads me to believe one of the possibilities I previously suggested. It is a mod, it is someone with mental illness that, for whatever reason, was having a moment of clarity that one time, or even lemmy is being targeted. If it is targeted, that makes me think that russian prop-pushing organizations have so thoroughly saturated the internet, they now have to seek fringe spaces online, in order to keep quotas, or something like that, up.