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.
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.
Seems like you’re missing a ton of nuance in manufacturing consent, and have turned from the frying pan into the fire in that sense.
Yes, Western media is biased towards corporations. This is most clearly seen in anything labeled “finance” or “money”, but is pervasive.
But the only time I can ever think of Western media doing anything on the scale of censoring the 1989 Tiananmin Square Massacre is the Iraq MWD debacle. And they’ve never done anything like the Great Firewall.
As a rule the US government does not mislead its own citizens the way Russia and China do.
And even if you’re 100% on board with every word Marx has written, I don’t understand how that leads one to defend modern day Russia and China.
The West absolutely has problems. And it’s good and right to point those out and try to fix them. But to try to paint the East as the answer to stand against the West is dangerous and dumb.
The great firewall is for your own protection, just look at how you guys react to a small group of users with different opinions!
Are people stupid enough to believe this?
Lemmy was built by communists and the audacity of these liberals to come here and demand shelter from exposure to communists is really something
I have no problem with communism, I have a problem with authoritarian propaganda.
Let’s not pretend that your politics aren’t inherently authoritarian as well.
Either you support capitalism (or worse), which is grossly authoritarian as it inflicts massive violence not only via warfare but through mass starvation and deprivation, or you support socialism, in which case you have two options:
The violent overthrow of the current system (spoiler alert: that’s a very authoritarian thing to do!)
The gradual reform of the current system, meaning maintaining the status quo for an exceptionally long time as we ever so slowly creep our way to a more just economic system while countless people starve, go homeless, die without healthcare, end up in yet-another war and so on (which is a very authoritarian proposition, just throwing away the lives of the poor in your own country-not to mention those in the developing world-just so you can have a neat and tidy reformist approach that doesn’t rock the boat.)
Ok…
Leaving this here for anyone else who got this far and feels confused:
Authoritarianism is a political system characterized by the rejection of political plurality, the use of strong central power to preserve the political status quo, and reductions in the rule of law, separation of powers, and democratic voting.
Using wikipedia as a reference for political ideology is like asking W Bush which countries are good and bad
Check out the cool political plurality in the USA
name your favourite anti-authoritarian system. you wanna have a revolution to create it? whoopsie doopsie, you’re literally forcing people (maybe at gunpoint!!!) to do something that they don’t want to do, you fucking authoritarian tankie monster. next you’ll be saying you want to get rid of corporations (extremely authoritarian over those business owners)