Hey, guess who invented Fox News. You think they stopped there as the internet became the new battleground? Why don’t we hear about what the GOP bots are doing? China and Russia, though guilty themselves, are generally red herrings in these contexts because the GOP doesn’t want the fingers pointed where they belong.
I don’t think the GOP isn’t trying, but I think Russia in particular is just way ahead of the game where this stuff is concerned. Democrats in no way have a monopoly on just being coked-up boomers bouncing around Washington having no real coherent idea of what successful political strategy looks like and not really having to care. I think most of the successful non-mainstream-media manipulation and funding comes from outside the country, it just happens that what they want to happen lines up with promoting the GOP by coincidence.
Wrong. The GOP has been planning their coup since the 1970s. Fox came out in 1996. They wrote the playbook on dismantling America and have been working on it since before the internet brought Russian bots. Before trump got enriched by Moscow money.
Yeah, and they’re still using the playbook they worked out in the 90s: AM radio and cable news channels. If they were as hip as the Russians are in terms of hooking up social media bots and funding podcasters, we’d be in even more trouble than we currently are.
I’m not saying they didn’t do a ton of home-grown damage (and are continuing to), I’m just saying the landscape has changed enough that they’re not where the forefront of innovation is at this point.
Russian bots are gop bots.
whos actually distrbuting disinfo to fox, its putin, Murdoch and putin has been seen several times working together.
Even though this influence campaigns exist there is way too big of an attempt to paint all internal American born violence and hate movements as “foreign” that is wildly inaccurate. America doesn’t need outside influence given its birth and long history of “native” hatred, oppression and violence,
It might be true that there are bad actors - some even from china or russia - that are intentionally stoking tensions in the us, but dismissing that tension as manufactured would be a mistake.
Democracy is supposed to be a pressure valve for political dissent, and when those institutions start failing to address the demands of citizens, they start looking for more and more extreme ways to make their dissatisfaction known. American democracy stopped addressing the grievances of the people long before 2016 came along. Trump himself embodies an antiestablishment resentment that could be seen making itself known all the way back in 2008 and 2012, most vividly (in my mind, at least) during the townhall with Romney in 2011 when the conservative members in the crowd yelled at him that Obama was a terrorist. Both parties have been trying to suppress the populist sentiment in their respective bases for a long time, and 2016 was merely a watershed moment for what was set in motion a long time ago.
Which is why I find myself with mixed feelings in the wake of Kirk’s death; catharsis, for seeing a stochastic agitative propagandist being on the receiving end of the violent environment he actively created and advocated for, and fear and frustration, for knowing that his death will do nothing to quell the surge in fascism and likely only embolden many more to do the same.
Well it shouldn’t be so easy tbh
True that, our society is soft and complacent and that is the cause of most of our problems.
What does being soft and complacent even mean??? Western states do everything they can to propagandize people since birth, so whenever some racist asshole is the only one to use glaringly obvious contradictions -that no one in power will address (because it endagers their position)- people will accept that asshole as a truthsayer.
Perfect example: immigration
Those bots have been so successful the past few years that if they shut them all down tomorrow, it wouldn’t matter because they managed to radicalize enough idiots to keep it going.
They’ve actually studied this and found it not to be true. I’ll look for the study later, but it said that if you cut off access to Fox News and Facebook, people get less racist and wanting to do harm.
Do they really? Or are they just less emboldened to verbalize their bigotry?
I suspect a surprising percentage of people just follow the crowd. No effort required to formulate any bigotry or predudice or whatever, just copy others and you’re part of the gang. If there’s nothing to copy they just shrink out of view.
If you stop exciting them they return to a low energy state
If one stops drinking alcohol, one stops being drunk.
I think people in groups acclimatize to the vibe of their surroundings and verbalize things in a nudged way to land well within the group. So if the group is toxic, the nudge will be toxic.
Seem the same studies. Google “if you cut off access to Fox News and Facebook, people get less racist and wanting to do harm”
There are plenty of reputable resources to investigate.
well actually, it actually stops thier momentum. case in point on reddit, when they were actually clean sweeping all the propaganda bot, the site remained extremely quiet for a few days of any astroturfing or “both sides” bs. yea it doesnt stop the violence, they just lose steam really quickly. the Right constantly need something to poke them into action.
what the hell is “online violence”
Framing to attack free speech.
Unrelated but gdamn his face is shrunken
Love being called a Russian bot for a brand new reason every 3 months.
Exactly what a Russian bot would say
So of course, I had to check your comment history and, though it’s evident you are not trying to be a social saboteur, your manner can be quite abrasive or even arrogant at times and thus seem like a provocateur.
So if that’s part of your schtick, I guess you might as well just get used to the accusations now and then.
Weird info to volunteer
It’s really easy to make shitlibs accuse you of being a Russian bot. Attack their argument from the left.
That’s all it takes.
ShItLiB
Are you trying to do a SpongeBob meme thing?
Because you’re failing if so.
I’m trying to say that people who use that term are idiots
Ah. Ok. Thank you.
So do you prefer centrist or moderate to shitlib? I’m all about using people’s preferred synonyms whenever possible.
I’m not concerned with what morons say or do anymore
It’s the new shill.
Maybe stop saying the exact things the Russian bots are saying?
I don’t at all think that every single person (or even most of them) that thinks shooting right-wing politicians is a good idea, is a Russian bot. But definitely I think you should rethink what you believe and closely and calmly read up on what the people who disagree with you think about it, if you’re so similar to the literal Russian bots that people are prone to confusing you for one.
The people I “disagree with” already want to send people like me to camps? They are already sending some citizens to countries they have literally never been to. We are past the point where simple words will do.
That’s why you use complex words :)
?
I meant listen to people like this. I definitely didn’t mean listen to the MAGA people, no.
Ohhh. Yeah I still disagree with Sanders but I wish I belived the world he thinks could exist could. Unfortunately it seems like political violence has been the only way things have changed throughout history and it seems like it will continue to be that way.
Unfortunately it seems like political violence has been the only way things have changed throughout history
The fuck?
- Abolition of slavery
- Women’s right to vote
- New Deal and general rise of unions and working people
- Mid 60s US civil rights movement
- Indian independence movement
- BLM and police reform
I literally cannot think of a single one of those (or any other issue) where the resolution would have come sooner or better, if the side supporting it had been shooting random leaders on the other side. Sometimes violence is involved, sure, but literally every time I can think of assassination coming into the picture, it was being done by the bad guys, and it made things worse.
Edit: Actually, I thought of two: In reconstruction in the US, and in postwar Germany, I think in hindsight it would have been better if they’d killed more of the political leaders. The difference there is that it was settled on a mass scale first, and then, we’re just implementing the will of the majority faction in an already deadly-mass-violence situation. If you’re in the minority faction (unable to get your will enacted through the democratic process because 40% of the country supports fascism for example), and you start randomly killing leaders to try to make it your way even so, you’re gonna have a bad time. Win or lose, you’re not going to get to a destination I want to go to.
How do you define the term political violence? Genuinely asking because I think we might be speaking past eachother if you don’t consider the civil war, and a lot of the civil rights movements to be examples without political violence.
I was very specific about what I was talking about. Search in these comments for “assassination” and “shooting” to see when I discussed it precisely.
I’m not trying to talk about “political violence” in the abstract, specifically because it can mean different things to different people, and I don’t see the point in getting tangled up in definitions. So in that sense maybe we’re talking past each other. You said “political violence,” but instead of dealing with that topic in the abstract, I narrowed it down to the specific Charlie Kirk incident, and then talked in specifics about what types of things I do and don’t support. You can search for “will of the majority” to see me talking positively about some things that it sounds like you might define as political violence.
None of those happen at all. They never happen without the “threat of force”
Whether implied or actually used. All power flows forth from the threat of force. If the threat of force doesn’t exist then there is no reason for bad actors to negotiate at all. They can just roll over anyone they want.
The absence of the Threat of Force is why protest in this country doesn’t work. Because those in power know that its toothless. Look to Europe and Asia. To South America. When people protest there the politicians perk up because they know that the protest isn’t the end. It’s the prelude to God only knows what. Riots. Fires. Farmers dumping tens of thousands of pounds of manure on parliament. Etcetera. Their protest isn’t toothless. They have not been taught since birth that “violence is always wrong”. They will burn shit. They won’t start with burning shit. But that is invariably a potential outcome if protest is ignored.
Completely agree with more or less all of that. In particular:
Riots. Fires. Farmers dumping tens of thousands of pounds of manure on parliament. Etcetera.
Yes, we should definitely be doing more of that. And, I think it is particularly interesting that most of the suspicious accounts I observed on Lemmy during the beginning of the “No Kings” protests were super against the idea of getting organized and going out in the streets as a prelude and preparation for things like that. They were saying things like that particular protests were a “false flag,” extensively nail biting about the unsafe nature of getting out to protest, that they were going to sit this one out, stuff of that nature.
I wonder why they were so against organized vigorous disobedience, and now they’re so in favor of random sudden violence against leaders. Almost as if one leads to much different outcomes than the other, and they’re trying to mold things specifically towards one of the outcomes and not the other.
Well, if you assume any action wherein someone loses and someone wins is violence… sure. Economic sanctions? Violence. Political action? Violence. Organized non-violent protest? Better believe that’s violence.
There are some people who only respond to violence because they act with violence… but by no means is that the only thing any bad actor ever does.
They will burn shit. They won’t start with burning shit. But that is invariably a potential outcome if protest is ignored.
And yet they have to keep doing it. Over and over and over. Almost like it doesn’t actually fix things, just look at France. They’ve been through six republics and they still haven’t had lasting positive momentum. They’ve had violent protests almost non-stop about just about every issue there’s been in the last decade or more… and yet things haven’t really been fixed. The people in power still do what they think is best, often to the benefit of themselves and the detriment of the rest of the populace.
Even if violence can promote change… it doesn’t promote solutions.
I mean… the abolition of slavery may be a bad choice on your part. Here in America there was a ton of violence on that aspect, and I argue we’d have had a lot less heartache if the confederate officers were treated like the traitors they were.
Violence was the response from the people who decided they didn’t want to abolish slavery. It was already well on its way by the time the south seceded.
I was talking about a specific thing which didn’t exactly include the civil war: Specifically the idea of randomly assassinating leaders who represent the “evil” faction (from whoever’s point of view), anonymously from out of the crowd. Mass violence as a way of implementing the will of the majority, once the other outlets for implementing it have failed, is a whole other story.
I also agree with you about violence against confederates after the war was over. Read my edit, I realized it and added that as a specific category where we could have used more of that, yes.
Protests are the threat of violence. People complain about them being ineffective but they are just too small then.
Most of the important social change throughout history has been done by slow constant effort of people being organized and persistent, not violent.
The change didn’t come from violence, it came from the actions of people in the wake of violence.
Show me a Russian bot on Lemmy. I, and I’m sure plenty of instance admins would love to know what they look like.
I could be banned from this community if I did. That’s the way they set up the rules for it.
You’re not squirming out of this so easily. If you have seen a Russian bot, dm me the evidence. Ill post it.
I DMed you an example of one of the accounts posting constantly about US politics, and then one day using non-US currency punctuation in their numbers. That in itself isn’t all that weird, obviously, but then someone asked them the fairly obvious question of, wait, hang on, where are you from? If you’re not from the US (which looking at your numbers you clearly are not), then why do you post constantly about US politics? And, of course, the particular take they had on politics was exactly the same bizarre “all anti-Democrats all the time” opinion set that a lot of these accounts tend to have.
Anyway, when asked about the punctuation, they professed total confusion about the question, made a weird comment about symbols on their calculator, accused people of being super weird for thinking anything was strange about the non-American style they used for money, got hostile, and refused to engage anymore. Basically their answer was 100% bizarre. That part of it is a pretty strong indication that they’re a foreign influence operation, although of course I have no idea whether that means “Russian,” and it’s impossible to really be sure.
They’ve long since been banned for other sins, but that was the one that really stuck out to me as actual evidence. Most of the time, it’s impossible to tell the difference between an influence operation and just someone with a particular set of genuine opinions. They’re only really obvious when they fuck up like that or something, which doesn’t happen all that often.
There you go, no squirming required.
Whether that poster is American or not, they’re quite obviously not a bot. But accusing people who are critical of America’s bipartisan support for genocide of just being a foreigner is a little too mask-off.
But accusing people who are critical of America’s bipartisan support for genocide of just being a foreigner is a little too mask-off.
I had a feeling you would wildly misconstrue lol
I was and still am very welcoming of people who are critical of America’s bipartisan support for genocide. I’m one of them. People who wanted to make the genocide ten times worse (and have now succeeded), by letting someone into power who wants to turn what was already a catastrophe into something much, much darker, probably the end of Gaza and maybe the end of the West Bank depending, I was opposed to.
People who were willing to sacrifice Gaza by letting Trump come into office, for whatever reasons of their own, and disguise it behind a tissue-thin veneer of care for Palestinians and accuse other people of some kind of wild weirdness any time someone calls them out on it, I was definitely opposed to. Also, not to mention sacrificing progress on the climate, safety for anyone inside the US who’s not a citizen, free elections, all kinds of things which are now in horrible danger.
Anyway, this account clearly wasn’t American and was still agitating tirelessly for a particular outcome in American politics which was guaranteed to make things much, much, much worse for Palestinians. If you want to say that they’re not literally a bot, and I haven’t proven that they’re Russian, then sure. Fair. IDK why you would immediately react though by making excuses for this user or pretending that my complaint was something absolutely wholly different from what my complaint was, if you cared about Palestinians.
How about all the “Democrats are equally as bad as Republicans” bots and the “Genocide Joe” bots?
I bet you saw a lot of those.
You know, the ones who made sure the Democrats didn’t get enough votes to win against someone as dumb as Trump?
Show me one, an actual bot. Nearly any instance admin would be happy to ban them.
Though if you meant “malicious foreigners are the reason people were saying genocide is bad and the dems need to stop it or they will lose”, we can have that discussion instead.
Daily beast article spreading dubious info pointing fingers at Russians and Chinese bots, based on what Cox said.
What does “vs disinfo” mean? “Fediverse vapidly slinging disinfo”?
When last night’s phone call from the folks turned to Kirk and violence, I made a point to mention that, yes, there were lots of posts for violent ‘retribution’, but we have no idea how many are just bots trying to stir the pot rather than actual people – but consoled? them that it was still proper to worry because surely those posts would convince some suggestible people that the bot-post ideas are a widely held and acceptable reaction.
Don’t blame American lunatics on Russians and Chinese. It wasn’t the Russians or the Chinese that voted for Trump or shot Charlie Kirk.
No, the Americans just voted for them after being brainwashed by tons of Russian and Chinese propaganda.
Americans are stupid, but the Russians and Chinese propaganda machines are not innocent.
This sounds a lot like motivated reasoning to me. Frustration and resentment has been simmering in the US long before social media was big enough to be useful in astroturfing campaigns.
Don’t give them all the credit.
We have enough homegrown propaganda on our own.
Americans need to take responsibility for the state their country is in, and not find excuses or scapegoats to blame.
Lol wtf is my “responsibility” here?
That like 3 billionaires directly control all media in my country? That I was never in possession of any political leverage to oppose the oil/pharma/tech/etc… lobbies? That it’s completely impossible for me to find any suitable representation in a two party system that has been entrenched for 200+ years? That my politicians have been steadily captured by domestic and foreign money, ruled as “free speech” by a group of robed geriatrics who have held their lifetime seats since before I was old enough to form a political thought?
Unless you’re going to sell me some plausible counter history where the entire system was upended, where the fuck does any American’s personal “responsibility” come into play? Telling me I should have saved the world by voting better is as big a lie as telling end consumers to save the ecosystem by recycling.
I mean Laura loomer is clearly a lizard in the least convincing skin suit I’ve ever seen
Stop with the bs. Americans are doing this all by themselves
Oh, my bad.
I have been more active, but I don’t know about a “tremendous amount”
Trump is a pedo
RELEASE THE FILES
The number of AI generated images reinforcing the apoplectic right’s unchecked hatred of the left is astonishing, along with a flood of pic/text images along the same lines. Just blind hatred all demanding something be done to the left.
I am so glad I abandoned Instagram and friends. I have no idea about this and I would be unhappy to see it in action.
