Whether or not you consider it “disinfo,” doesn’t it smell rather like astroturf? Note that !europe@lemmy.dbzer0.com is one of the targeted communities.
Abridged from the original post.
cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/39655060
What they seem to have in common is:
- Way more posts than comments.
- Almost exclusively posting news articles.
- The vast majority of the articles are critical of Russia or China.
- Virtually always posting to the same few communities. Often there’s overlap in the communities the accounts target.
- Consistent weekly output.
Username Start End tardigrada@beehaw.org May 2022 Dec. 2024 0x815@feddit.de Apr. 2023 Jun. 2024 thelucky8@beehaw.org Apr. 2024 Jan. 2025 0x815@feddit.org Jun. 2024 Dec. 2024 Anyone@slrpnk.net Jan. 2025 Apr. 2025 @randomname@scribe.disroot.org Jan. 2025 – @Hotznplotzn@lemmy.sdf.org Jan. 2025 – @Scotty@scribe.disroot.org Aug. 2025 – @Sepia@mander.xyz Nov. 2025 –
No more than criticism of Western countries posted is generally AstroTurf. I know at least one of the names on that list, and while they’re comment to post ratio is lopsided. I do see them commenting on articles they post regularly.
They all comment on their posts at least on occasion.
Well, if they do like the one I’m thinking of. Posting, replying, and commenting. Then it wouldn’t make them hardly any different from longtime regulars like return2ozma. Apart from the join date. Do I agree with everything Ozma posts? No. Quite a bit I don’t. But that doesn’t make them a bot because I don’t like all their posts.
No individual or group is above critique. Though it’s especially suspicious when all critique often gets dismissed as blueanon/deepstate or similar. Any state in the general sense. With highly concentrated power like the US, UK, Hungary, South Korea, Japan, or China is corrupt and abuses those in their power. But dios mio the ridiculous push back you get when mentioning that about a particular one of those. Sometimes individuals or groups you think you identity with turn out to be abusive assholes. I’ve seen it with politicians, bands, artists, etc. The concept of something and the reality are often very different. And no one likes to be gaslit about it.
You’re right, return2ozma is another example of similarity, except, like schizoidman, isn’t posting the same metanarrative almost exclusively.
Plenty of people post the same meta narrative constantly. Often in small niche communities, often devoted to things other than politics. But I have some bad news. This is what being a world power is like. You’re going to get criticized and called out constantly.
Maybe you should view this as a good thing. You’ve made it! Now you’re legitimately experiencing what many like yourself have subjected others to. Success right? The more power the CCP gets, the more they threaten their neighbors, the louder it’s going to get. And the more valid concerns get dismissed the less good will there will be.
Respectfully I already have very little. With all the disrespect and counter meta narrative surrounding this issue. Legitimately I can give actual names of victims of CCP threats and oppression. And have. Legitimately only yesterday, it was hand-waved away as fantasy and somehow an appeal to Western racism? Fuck if I know. The way terms like sinophobia get tossed about so much as a deflection and defense causing it to lose almost all its meaning. Like Zionists have done with anti-Semitism.
No group with as much control or power as the CCP can always be the victim or good guy. That’s not how it works. Whether or not a lot of the reporting surrounding China and the CCP is exaggerated or even maybe false. Part of that is the CCPs fault. With as flawed, lacking, and diminishing as press independence and freedom has been in Western spheres. It’s utter absence under the CCP, is damning. Any sane person would ridicule someone for accepting the word of a bully exonerating themselves. But with China in some spaces it’s demanded that we do so. Nope.
Tell me how@Sepia@mander.xyz is not a bot, folks: https://lemmy.ml/post/39622979/22521431
Why did you screenshot someone for posting a quote from an article they linked to as the source for their comment?
Do you not understand how quotes work? They don’t make you an AI.
Although you do love to copy and paste large walls of ghost written, conversation terminating propaganda text all the time, so maybe you are a bot? 🤔
inb4 the BlueAnon Defense League:
- IT Pro: Cambridge Analytica models were exaggerated and ineffective, [UK Information Commissioner’s Office] claims
- Wall Street Journal: Mueller Doesn’t Find Trump Campaign Conspired With Russia
- Jacobin: Democrats and Mainstream Media Were the Real Kremlin Assets
- Washington Post: FEC fines DNC, Clinton for violating rules in funding Steele dossier
- Washington Post: Russian trolls on Twitter had little influence on 2016 voters
- Jacobin: It Turns Out Hillary Clinton, Not Russian Bots, Lost the 2016 Election
- Matt Taibbi: Move Over, Jayson Blair: Meet Hamilton 68, the New King of Media Fraud The Twitter Files reveal that one of the most common news sources of the Trump era was a scam, making ordinary American political conversations look like Russian spywork
- Jacobin: Why the Twitter Files Are in Fact a Big Deal On the Left, there’s been a temptation to dismiss the revelations about Twitter’s internal censorship system that have emerged from the so-called Twitter Files project. But that would be a mistake: the news is important and the details are alarming.
- MSNBC Repeats Hamilton 68 Lies 279 Times in 11 Minutes
- Matt Taibbi: CIA “Cooked The Intelligence” To Hide That Russia Favored Clinton, Not Trump In 2016
- Aaron Maté: Under Trump, the CIA is still covering up its Russiagate fraud
- Matt Taibbi: Note on New Trump-Russia Disclosures Thanks to explosive new document releases, the Russiagate hoax is now exposed, commencing a new era that will be about accountability for the guilty
- Matt Taibbi: No Doubt Left: Russiagate Was a Cover-Up
- Chris Hedges: Why Russiagate Won’t Go Away The cynical con the Democratic Party and the F.B.I. carried out to falsely portray Donald Trump as a puppet of the Kremlin worked, and continues to work, because it is what those who detest Trump want to believe.
Maybe if either country’s government would behave like a bags of dicks, people wouldn’t have to be posting that stuff.
China is committing ge oxide in uyghurs, Russia is committing genocide in Ukraine, and those two valid accusations are just the tip of the iceberg
If you want less bad news about these two countries, it’s simple: just remove their dictators, install ab actual democracy, and have them starting to respect human rights. It wouldn’t be all needed, but it’d be a good start
China is committing ge oxide in uyghurs
No.
Russia is committing genocide in Ukraine
just remove their dictators
Neither has a dictator. One has an oligarch installed by fellow oligarchs, just like the US & Canada do, while the other was democratically elected.
install ab actual democracy
One of them already has an actual democracy, while the other one has a bourgeois democracy, just like your country and mine do.
have them starting to respect human rights.
How about we get our own houses in order? Or have you forgotten about their complicity in an actual, ongoing genocide in occupied Palestine?
No.
Yes.
Also no.
Also yes.
Neither has a dictator. One has an oligarch installed by fellow oligarchs, just like the US & Canada do, while the other was democratically elected.
Both have dictators, as is evident by their absolute or near-absolute hold on political power.
One of them already has an actual democracy, while the other one has a bourgeois democracy, just like your country and mine do.
One has mock elections, the other has one party. Neither are a democracy, fairing even worse than a representative “democracy”.
How about we get our own houses in order? Or have you forgotten about their complicity in an actual, ongoing genocide in occupied Palestine?
Fuck no. You can hold others to account while also holding yourself. We are capable of working on multiple things at once, we don’t have to solve poverty before we can tackle the climate and so on and so forth.
You can deny the genocide all you want, but it is ongoing in Xinjiang and will be fully realised in Ukraine if Russia’s territorial annexation is completed.
Hey, I’m back in Urumqi right now, still no genocide.
Do you also think Portland is a warzone?
Anything’s possible when you make shit up kiddo
Idonno, that someone shares a lot of news articles and doesn’t comment as much doesn’t seem that odd… I agree it’s a bit weird it’s no memes or anything, but I can see lemmy users honestly not doing memes.
I do agree, it smells like astroturfing tho - it is just beyond what a quite normal user would do
I’ve run across one other user who fits the general pattern, the important difference being that they aren’t monomaniacly focused on China bad and Russia bad: @schizoidman@lemmy.zip (previously schizoidman@lemm.ee & schizoidman@lemmy.ml).
Lemmygrad./ml [users] frequently share posts that support authoritarian regimes, as seen in their support for China, North Korea, and Russia. Moreover, their support can extend beyond backing these authoritarian regimes, even cheering on their violent actions, as evidenced by their posts on the Russian invasion of Ukraine …
Lemmygrad./ml … also serves as a hub for left-wing extremist subreddits that faced restrictions from Reddit. [There is] an increase in user activity and toxicity levels on Lemmygrad.ml following the migration of r/GenZedong and r/GenZhou. Furthermore, our analysis of the content revealed posts supporting authoritarian regimes, endorsing the Russian invasion of Ukraine, and exhibiting anti-Zionist and antisemitic rhetoric. Our findings underscore the importance of studying left-wing extremism on decentralized platforms alongside right-wing extremism to gain a comprehensive understanding of the full spectrum of political extremism on the Decentralized Web …
Buddy, we went over this already. Why are you reposting your own comment? Are you stuck in a loop?
one of the authors of this hilarious paper:
I kinda wish someone would pay me a half million dollars to get mad about lemmy posts
I saw these coming two years ago:
it will always amaze me how several users just have the time to post news articles CONSTANTLY. it’s to the point that ive started blocking users just because 5 different people will post the same articles about an event, all to their own selection of 5 communities (with some overlap) all of which get shown on the all feed. it also doesn’t help that I don’t generally come to Lemmy to get depressed from recent news when I already get plenty of that from coworkers and family.
this is not to say that I think its necessarily unhealthy to have such power users, its just very… very… very… not my cup of tea
upon looking again, it does concern me that these people all stopped posting around similar times, which in my eyes seem to be between trump’s election results and him actually coming into power. could totally be paranoia though this is all just speculation
I don’t take issue with power posters per se, just ones that are indistinguishable from glowies.
