Why does it matter if the responses are from patriotic citizens or not?

"Bad faith" is lunacy, who cares? Arguments matter all on their own, regardless of the motivation for making them.

Of course you "think" they are paid trolls or bots, we all see that constantly. My first post on Reddit years ago was followed immediately by charges of being a Russian spy. Maybe they were a Russian spy and I was diversion?

Anyway, troll, bot, human, paid or not, irrelevant. The discussion is seen by others and judged on the merit of the argument itself. Stop worrying about the source, as you can never know, so it doesn't matter. It's not as if you get better results by talking to an unpaid patriotic person. Same shit.

Propaganda problem? Not at all. Every form of social media is rife with propaganda, as is every paper, website, news channel, and so on. How could Lemmy be any different?

Ive been here less than a week and have encountered multiple extremists, schizo level posts, and just ludicrous positions to take.

It's clear that things like moderates and centrism dont have much of a home here.

It is what it is but ill say this.

Do not be afraid to just block them, theres not that many people here.

This year i was sort of flamed 3 times and the 4th had me banned from some lemmy.ml community. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

What I did (in my opinion. Can't say what the users interpreted)?
Advocate for equal gender rights
Say that China is bad (and the US)
Some other stuff about China or something which I forgot already
Call out unneccessary racism in a headline instead of just mentioning minorities or just residents that were being harmed by the musk-rat.

Was I right in those discussions? Mostly not or at least not from most angles
Was I 100% in the wrong? I wouldnt say so.

Let me guess, Lemmy.ml? That's normal, that instance (and lemmy as a project) was created because the creators were too extreme for /r/communism and thus banned from it.

Lemmy is big enough to be a psyop target and has been for a while. This place is rife with feds and bots of every persuasion and they will try to influence you from every angle. As Lemmy grows it will only get worse. It's easy to brush off pushback for criticizing nation states but also be aware that the FBI in particular has a history of trying to push people towards violent radicalism and in person meetups. Do not trust anyone online. Especially if they agree with you politically.

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.

i think people are too quick to call anyone like that a "paid troll". like i just don't think one can reasonably expect a government like china to waste their resources on a platform as small as the threadiverse...

Unfortunately the devs of lemmy and their instance (.ml) have some extremely questionable views, and they love to rile people up with false claims and bad faith arguments.

Some of their classics are that communism is the only acceptable form of society, and it is completely infallible. China and Russia have never done anything bad, and left wing people in democracies are just as bad as the right. Socialism bad, communism good. PS, you are a capitalist pig.

Noob mistake. Been there done that. I'm banned from .ml for saying China bad. Welcome to the team

There's also the folks that try to discourage folks from participating in political change, be it by voting or protest by saying both sides are bad and it doesn't matter what we do.

It's a tellingly consistent message, that first began showing up in the last US presidential election.

Yes, anytime China is criticized for human rights abuses (and rightly so) replies are flooded with wall-of-text "rasonable explainers" sealioning why one should never criticize China, especially not Americans.

Was it Russia and China by any chance?

My favorite though was when I spelled tanki wrong and left it because it was cute, and they were outraged that I would spell it wrong more so than calling them tanki.

Widdle tanki got a sad sad that someone was mean to poo poo

You probably spoke to .ml users. They are some of the most wilfully ignorant pro-CCP and pro-Kremlin users. Some are, without a doubt, paid trolls.

As another user mentioned, look if the username ends in .ml but there are such propagandists who have non-.ml accounts and post nonsensical verbages that .ml usually parrots.

Whenever I’ve encountered propaganda or have been flamed for talking about human rights, etc. it’s been from instances ending in “.ml”.

I don’t know what that means, but I would like to be able to block all “.ml” users.