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Is it me or does Lemmy have a propaganda problem? (lemmy.zip)

submitted 1 day ago by jobbies@lemmy.zip to c/asklemmy@lemmy.world

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In the past week I've been absolutely roasted for criticising two different countries. Normally I'd be okay with that, I can handle a mild toasting and after all debate is a good thing.

On both occasions though I was flamed for mentioning human rights issues that are established facts and have been known for many, many years. I was critical of the actions/laws of their governments and not the people, their race, religion, general political ideology or nationality.

On both occasions I was bombarded by long posts that parroted propaganda, and in the case of one country I was told (on multiple occasions) that I was ignorant, racist and even fascist for mentioning the issues I did. I'm not complaining about how I was treated, but as a reminder, I was discussing internationally-recognised human rights concerns that can be verified and based in fact.

I could just be paranoid but I'm fairly convinced the responses weren't from patriotic citizens. I think they were paid trolls or bots, and I think their purpose was to quiet negative talking points about the countries that were mentioned.

Has anyone else had a similar experience?

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[-] SpaceCowboy@lemmy.ca 1 points 6 hours ago

I've seen multiple pro-Iran comments which were the exact same text but from different accounts that even appear in the same thread before. Probably their troll farm screwed up something since things can get hectic there lately.

Yeah, I don't think lemmy has many measures to prevent foreign propaganda. Not a trivial problem to solve, I suppose. So I just let them post their unhinged propaganda replies, any bystander should be able understand that they're kinda nuts.

There may need to be some oversight on mods, but not sure how even that would work given the distributed nature of lemmy. But it's likely propagandists have become mods of some communities. This has resulted in some channels to be propaganda channels with no ability for anyone to post any facts in opposition to the propaganda. Sunlight is the best sanitizer, so maybe there just needs to somewhere moderation decisions can be viewed and discussed. That way we could know which channels are overt propaganda channels and some instances can choose to block them if that's what members of that instance want.

The more concerning problem on lemmy is the stochastic terrorism that occurs here. That is, the rationalizations for committing violent acts locally in the hopes that someone that's mentally unwell will actually do those things. There needs to be efforts to remove those kinds of posts and ban those making them or people may get hurt, jailed, or killed. These kinds of things only hurt whatever political movement you may believe in, and only cause harm.

this post was submitted on 17 Jul 2026

179 points (82.8% liked)

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