Why not? Socialism and Anarchy are both very popular among the fringe groups and youth demographics they’re trying to persuade into subterfuge. They’re also targeting LGBT.

Go over to Hexbear or Lemmygrad and you can clearly see tons of pro-China and pro-Russia (more specifically Pro-Jinping and Pro-Putin) posts all hours of the day, and all of it is constantly flooding into the instances that federate with them.

They stoke extremist political views in their “enemies” societies while also spreading propaganda. Its a facade

there are almost certainly people propagandizing on chans, especially 4chans /pol/ as it has a fairly large user base and has proven to be very influential with dozens (or more) of academic papers written about its culture and dynamics.

https://firstmonday.org/ojs/index.php/fm/article/download/11075/11269/83226 this paper shows trends in pol posting surrounding major news events (mass shootings). Specifically after the Pittsburgh shooting they see a significant change of a small number of pro trump links circulated hundreds of times immediately in the aftermath, more so than before the incident. There are similar papers and many more describing the culture to help potential actors assimilate as quickly as possible

Again, the causal nature is impossible to prove (unless Hiroyuki starts leaking ips and they can be linked to someone somehow, I guess), but it appears someone(s) has been using that forum to make a concentrated effort to promote certain ideas, mainly pro trump propaganda and antisemitism.

Based on estimates 4chan gets anywhere from 20-60 million visitors per month. /pol/ alone sees well over 100-120k posts per day right now per 4stats.io, 4chans official stats. It’s by far one of the most active boards, running about the same as /vg/, dedicated to general gaming, and also full of bullshit but the whiny gamer kind (which is a well established pipeline to places like /pol/). whereas core 4chan boards like /b/ (random, the original board, where kind of anything goes), and /a/ (anime, probably the earliest board once it split from just /b/ for everything) being the next most active see barely half this, 40-50k posts per day.

Basically /pol/ sees a massive amount of discussion from a giant group of angry impressionable (often young but not always) people who are absolutely willing to campaign, make and spread memes, flood comment sections, etc. you’re foolish if you think that’s not being astroturfed and botted by people with vested interests. like is the trump campaign directly doing it? Probably not, but is one of their pacs kicking some money to some stormfront dudes who are? Maybe. It could also potentially be some weird trump group that spams and is otherwise unaffiliated with the campaign of course. That’s still propaganda, it’s just not sanctioned “officially”.

And this was touched on but the /pol/ influence is seen throughout the boards as well. They’ll spout their talking points on the videogame boards as mentioned like /v/, /vg/, etc to pull in gullible people but also the anime board (/a/), even slow boards like do it yourself (/diy/) which sees like 400 posts a day will get posts about immigration impacting trade jobs as a way to shoehorn in the typical rhetoric

In comparison according to fedidb lemmy has a bit under 400k users (a bit over 1/10th active, around 45k) and a bit over 8 million posts. That’s a footnote compared to 4chan which itself is dwarfed by the giants like reddit, facebook, etc that see monthly visitor counts in the billions. Of the fediverse mastodon would make the most sense to astroturf as it has significantly more users and posts. Unless they see serious growth potential and want to establish trust early on the platform, which would make sense I suppose, but looking at lemmys growth charted out that could be a very long wait for a return on investment. While posting is free paying people/bots to post isn’t. But perhaps they’re hoping it will become like /pol/, a niche forum on the internet that has decent enough traffic to become surprisingly influential. I do think this is unlikely, but who the fuck am I?

Of course, the statistics are not fully accurate here for either. 4chans traffic is estimated and sources vary pretty wildly, 4chans post counts should be accurate as that does come from 4chan. fedidb info is accurate but iirc doesn’t necessarily include all instances. That said it’s unlikely there’s an a few instances that would wildly skew the data and most estimates for 4chans traffic are on the higher end of 40-50 million visitors per month

It’s really easy to demonstrate. Ask them for an alternative to Harris/Trump and they’ll run around in circles to not give you a candidate and then tell you voting doesn’t work.

I’d like to apologize that you felt my response was dismissive. I certainly did not intend to make anybody feel that way. I didn’t have any specific examples to give, so I approached it from an anecdotal point of view based on my personal experiences.

Now that you mention it, I just realized I meant socialism and not communism. Thank you.

that would make sense in some aspects. Gotta love decentralized communities.

Correct. I’ve been here for just a month, but so far I haven’t seen a single slur that’s ableist, homophobic, transphobic, racist, or xenophobic.

Check my comment history. I routinely say many extremely negative things about that stupid MBFC bot in !news and have yet to receive a ban.

i realize the joke. BUT, tankies are generally pretty insufferable. Normies, don’t really happen to be all that insufferable, unless you’re a tankie who believes anything other than what you think is fucking extremist terrorist shit.

thats the point of instances, but idk why they show up in .ml or world in that case lol. You would think tankies would just directly echo chamber themselves, but they haven’t quite done that yet.

Yeah, like banning the KKK makes me the intolerant one.

As the top comment points out, they banned Linkerbaan. You could argue it was a public service.

That’s a lot of context to read through. Thank you for the link.

But you still rely on the admins of your new instead to decide what content you have access to and on the admins of others instances for the same thing. What I’m saying is that the admins shouldn’t have that kind of power. Heck, the website issue could be solved by having a disconnection between the front and back end.

Decentralize the hosting and make the data available to all (this way all hosts have some of the data but not all of it and you can have all data backed up by other hosts so no host can just nuke part of the website) this way anyone is able to create a frontend. So sh.itjust.works would just show me all of Lemmy’s content in the way the dev decided would be best (the UI would be of their choosing), but I would be the one deciding which communities and users I’m blocking. If I decide I don’t like how my chosen frontend works anymore I could just go and log in to another frontend using the same credentials because the data isn’t hosted on the frontend’s servers.

No admins, just community moderators.

We’ve always been at war with Ba Sing Se.

world is better, there’s a lot more normies there. They’ll also generally talk with you rather then telling you to kys even if they yell at you while doing it.

I appreciate that part.

It would be extremely easy for you to pop in and see for yourself, if you don’t want to take my word for it.

From a liberal perspective what’s the difference between MLs having “critical support” for the Soviets or China and anarchists celebrating historical anarchists like Makhno and the CNT-FAI who burned churches and killed kulaks too? If anarchists are online supporting US foreign policy then liberals can assume you’re just a liberal and any claimed anarchism is just larping, but if anybody throws a brick through a Starbucks window that’s tankie authoritarianism stealing rights and freedoms from the Starbucks shareholders.