MeanwhileOnGrad

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"Oh, this is calamity! Calamity! Oh no, he's on the floor!"

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Meanwhile On Grad

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

What is a Tankie?

Alternatively, a detailed blog post about Tankies.

(caution of biased source)

Basic Rules:

Sh.itjust.works Instance rules apply! If you are from other instances, please be mindful of the rules. — Basically, don't be a dick.

Hate-Speech — You should be familiar with this one already; practically all instances have the same rules on hate speech.

Apologia — (Using the Modern terminology for Apologia) No Defending, Denying, Justifying, Bolstering, or Differentiating authoritarian acts or endeavours, whether be a Pro-CCP viewpoint, Stalinism, Islamic Terrorism or any variation of Tankie Ideology.

Revisionism — No downplaying or denying atrocities past and present. Calling Tankies shills, foreign/federal agents, or bots also falls under this rule. Extremists exist. They are real. Do not call them shills or fake users as it handwaves their extremism.

Tankies can explain their views but may be criticised or attacked for them. Any slight infraction on the rules above will immediately earn a warning and possibly a ban.

Off-topic Discussion — Do not discuss unrelated topics to the point of derailing the thread. Stay focused on the direct content of the post as opposed to arguing.

You'll be warned if you're violating the instance and community rules. Continuing poor behaviour after being warned will result in a ban or removal of your comments. Bans typically only last 24 hours, but each subsequent infraction will double the amount. Depending on the content, the ban time may be increased. You may request an unban at any time.

founded 2 years ago

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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 5 days ago by PhilipTheBucket@ponder.cat to c/meanwhileongrad@sh.itjust.works

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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[–] Jiggle_Physics@sh.itjust.works 2 points 1 day 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?

[–] PhilipTheBucket@ponder.cat 3 points 1 day 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.

[–] Jiggle_Physics@sh.itjust.works 3 points 1 day 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.