I first noticed Russian social media manipulation when the comments section of my small local newspaper was suddenly filled with accounts that supported the Russian invasion of crimea 12 years ago.

Nothing is too small for propaganda bots.

if hexbear could read, they’d be very offended by this

Honestly you don’t actually see the tankies calling anyone CIA over here because “western indoctrination” is a good enough explanation on why someone said something for them. If you’re a tankie you run into people every day who think the US is the greatest country on earth and unless you’re schizophrenic you probably don’t think they’re CIA

On the other hand most people will never run into a tankie in real life so when they encounter one online they are much more likely to assume they’re outside agitators and not sincere.

The reverse is probably true in China under “tankie” hegemony. The anti-ccp liberals would call the pro-ccp brainwashed sheep and the pro-ccp would call the anti-ccp US assets.

They’re massive hypocrites.

Lemmy is an absolutely perfect venue for information warfare training. Hell, taken in a complete vacuum, I’d swear that’s exactly what lemmy.ml is doing. New recruits are trained up on forum culture, language skills and information warfare strategy before graduating to reddit and Facebook. All while under the protection of the veteran mods and admins (I would assume they get a chance to control some of those accounts as well to practice infiltration and control).

Honestly, how else would you train a professional internet troll?

A lot of the responses I get/give are a lot more human and understanding here comparing the rest of the Internet on average

I thought this community was supposed to be “free of the ML stuff” as per the sidebar