this post was submitted on 13 Aug 2023
173 points (88.1% liked)

main

1357 readers
4 users here now

Default community for midwest.social. Post questions about the instance or questions you want to ask other users here.

founded 3 years ago
MODERATORS
173
submitted 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
 

Has anyone else noticed how prevalent Hexbear posters have suddenly become? Maybe sometime last week I noticed nearly every political post had at least one long thread of Hexbear users that do nothing but repeat CCP talking points while waving anyway anything even remotely reliable as Western propaganda. That or getting all excited about trolled libs. The way they tell it, you'd think everything from DW, to Fox, to Propublica, to straight up AP News articles, are all written by the same people.

Not to mention, their info on the Fediverse observer is either straight up wrong or there's some serious botting going on. According to that, the instance is less than a month old, yet somehow they already have one of the largest, most active userbases, along with far and away the most comments of any instance.

Seems to me like Lemmygrad on steroids. Considering we defederated from them, seems like a no-brainer to block Hexbear as well.

So glad this thread could become such a perfect microcosm of why we need to defederate.

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] [email protected] 143 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago) (116 children)

Hexbear is actually one of the oldest Lemmy instances, been around for over three years. Due to technical issues around our high number of active users and having to rely on volunteer labour, we have only been able to federate within the last few weeks.

The way they tell it, you'd think everything from DW, to Fox, to Propublica, to straight up AP News articles, are all written by the same people.

Because they are. This isn't even a radical far left idea. Ever heard of "Manufacturing Consent" by Noam Chomsky? That's one of the main arguments, that the media is owned and controlled by the capitalist class.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago) (57 children)

Seems like you're missing a ton of nuance in manufacturing consent, and have turned from the frying pan into the fire in that sense.

Yes, Western media is biased towards corporations. This is most clearly seen in anything labeled "finance" or "money", but is pervasive.

But the only time I can ever think of Western media doing anything on the scale of censoring the 1989 Tiananmin Square Massacre is the Iraq MWD debacle. And they've never done anything like the Great Firewall.

As a rule the US government does not mislead its own citizens the way Russia and China do.

And even if you're 100% on board with every word Marx has written, I don't understand how that leads one to defend modern day Russia and China.

The West absolutely has problems. And it's good and right to point those out and try to fix them. But to try to paint the East as the answer to stand against the West is dangerous and dumb.

[–] [email protected] 43 points 2 years ago (7 children)

As a rule the US government does not mislead its own citizens the way Russia and China do.

I think most of users on hexbear and lemmygrad are not from US, so internal US politics is not so important to them, foreign policy is and that's where US made a lot of haters.

It is not even that surprising, every country that was in war with US involved is not liking it, no one likes other nation's army on their teritory, whatever the reason.

[–] [email protected] 50 points 2 years ago (1 children)

lol what? hexbear is largely amerikan. we just have a lot of international users bc we arent racist. US internal politics are horrific as well. Biden wrote the bill responsible for the massive increase in policing and the war on drugs in 1994

[–] [email protected] 34 points 2 years ago (1 children)

Makes sense, since podcast is from US too. Thank you for correcting me, I have never spent much time there since I don't get the humor.

[–] [email protected] 37 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago)

no problem. ik theres a lot of inside jokes so it can be confusing at first, but we are very welcoming as long as ur receptive to left-wing politics and act in good faith

load more comments (5 replies)
load more comments (54 replies)
load more comments (112 replies)