Ask Lemmy

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.

All websites are propaganda at this point.

Not enough propaganda if you ask me.

I had to block most of the Bahjal instances because they are just a transfem echo chamber and refuse to listen to any viewpoint that is even one atom out of alignment with the idea that Trans people are the next evolution of humanity. I had to quit Imgur for a similar reason. Frustrating because I AM an Ally, just one that is also, ya know, a realist.

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.

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.