And they’ve never done anything like the Great Firewall.

The great firewall is for your own protection, just look at how you guys react to a small group of users with different opinions!

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

How do you know that? Did the US government tell you?

Hexbear doesn’t “defend modern day Russia”. I’m sure there are some users who do purely from a position of believing a multipolar world is preferable to one dominated unilaterally by the US, but even in those users think Putin is a piece of shit.

There’s a difference between understanding NATO’s role in provoking the war in Ukraine, not calling Russians orcs or comparing Putin to Hitler and defending modern-day Russia.

1989 Tiananmin Square Massacre

Reality is calling

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

USians are literally the most propagandized pop on the planet.

USians are the only dipshits who think their state will just do the right thing with zero pressure.

Imagine thinking the people living in a system where bribery and corruption have literally been legalized and (somehow) still believe is the least corrupt system on earth, have not been propagandized into a pulp of absolute impotence and servility.

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

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.

then you should try to do some more thinking. maybe even some reading

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

You should check out literally any declassified CIA document.

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.

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

Hundreds of thousands of people were murdered for no reason to accomplish nothing but to line the pockets of Raytheon shareholders. And you write it off as if it doesn’t even matter.

No one, neither the politicians nor the journalists who knowingly lied to you faced any repercussions. Not only that, but in many cases, it’s the same people in the same positions with no reason not to do it again.

Even if you ignore all the other times that the media has lied, how many people do you believe died at Tiananmen Square to think that the two are remotely comparable?

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.

First of all, multiple western sources agree with us on Tiananmin Square

Second Iraq is definitly not the only time. Vietnam is another huge example. Literally every post-WWII military conflict has involved the press lying about it to manufacture consent. Some of the things are things you probably haven’t realized you’re being lied to about it yet though, so if I use them as examples it won’t help. But still.

Manufacturing Consent wasn’t just about the media being on the side of the corporations, its also about them being on the side of Western imperlialist motivations. And they will lie to you about “enemy countries” over, and over, and over again.

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

You think this because you don’t see the misleading happening and believing the things the western sources tell you about the “bad countries”.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/My_Lai_massacre

The US government doesn’t have to (but still does anyway) mislead its own citizens because it works hand in glove with the class it represents (not you) which does all the misleading via the private “free press” that it owns and operates for it’s own benefit.

For the life of me I will never understand why liberals think something bad is less bad when it is a private actor doing it instead of the government, but the private actors actually control more of your daily life than the government does because you live in a neoliberal hellscape.

You have no control over anything the government OR the corporate overlords do. Does it really matter which one is screwing you when they’re basically all the same people anyway?

With regard to China, please just try to ask yourself why the standard of living has been improving there for decades while it continues to decline in the US. It’s not fucking rocket science, but you can’t rely on western corporate media to explain it to you.

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.

But to try to paint the East Global South as the answer to stand against the West is dangerous and dumb

damn you sound like a chauv lol

just say you don’t like the Asianic horde

go full mask-off

But the only time I can ever think of Western media doing anything on the scale of censoring the 1989 Tiananmin Square Massacre is

inventing the reality of the 1989 TIANANMEN Square Massacre in the first place

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.

Aside from the incredible irony of this statement that others have mentioned

the only time I can ever think of Western media doing anything on the scale of

the only time I can ever think of

What leads you to being able to think of examples in China? Was it because you were there and experienced it yourself? Or did you hear about it from people who were there? Did you look through archives in China? Did you see modern reporting from (to pick an arbitrary state) India on this topic?

Or did you hear about it from western media themselves?

Can you see a conflict of interest in that conception of things? Perhaps especially when it comes to reporting on media fabrications in the west?

Edit: Russiagate is a fun example because I don’t give a shit either way, but the Dem-aligned media did an excellent job of convincing their base that Russia first hacked the election and then somehow flipped the election with Facebook ads, and had QAnon-level lore with Igor Fuckstyvich and Boris Shitov in a great web of conspiracy theories to draw connections between people. It was all so tedious that I stopped following it pretty early, but a lot of people still genuinely believe that shit even as it was shown that Russia did very, very little.

Also it keeps evading the notice of liberals that if Russia bought the election, that means Facebook sold it! I think that second one would be much more of a concern, especially since it should be more actionable for the US to control one of its own companies. Whoops.

Edit 2: Consider that most of what you believe about the DPRK is false because the media in the west is just a constant churn of comically bullshit stories. haircuts, anyone?

And we welcome our new peons

Welcome! I love your Super Monkey Ball pfp :) we have one site tag line (a little funny sentence or paragraph at the top of page which changes every time you load) and one of them is shit talking SMB so I hope you don’t get it and get turned off.

hi comrade we love you fr

who pays the journalists? who sets editorial policy? who prevents the journalists from unionizing?

The idea that media companies in the the west are subservient to the interests of capital and the military industrial state isn’t even a “tankie” take on the left. Similar ideas have been espoused by many people across the left, the most famous of which being Manufacturing Consent by Noam Chomsky.

the like 3 countries that pretend to be communist

You sound like an immensely condescending chauvinist. Does Cuba not live up to your very informed view on communism?

irrespective of any other empirical claims you’re making in this thread, you must see how ridiculous it is to claim that news from massive private and state owned corporations is little influenced by money because low level journalists aren’t paid well (if you reflect on it for a moment). it’d be like imagining that Wal Mart’s corporate policies are decided by cashiers and store shelvers

Like have you never had a job before? Like if you’re gonna accuse people of being out of touch, stop buying $10 bananas

I’m glad there are liberals like you around to tell us communists who is really communist

Is the executive of the media company that owns the news outlet also a journalist? Is the financial conglomerate that owns the media company as well as the missile company, also a journalist? Come on, you must have thought at least once in your life about this actually existing hierarchy of capitals and how it influences what news gets published and who gets to work as a journalist.

Ah yes, the classic wealthy journalist.

Do the journalists you read personally hand their writings to you? Or is there some intermediary that gets them to you, some wealthy entity that handles the publishing of those writings?

Ah yes, the classic wealthy journalist.

Ah yes, the classic wealthy Amazon worker. Everyone knows that having a logistics and retail monopoly is where the big bucks truly lie.

Obviously because the lowest level worker in this industry is not wealthy themselves, it means that suggesting the industry as a whole is both owned and serves the interests of entrenched power and wealth IS BIG DUMB LOL

Friend here really thinks we’re going after journalists for making imaginary bank, and not Murdoch and his mates.

On further read, you guys kind of feel at the very least like the left-wing equivalent of somethingawful.com.

Oh my God that’s genuinely so sweet

I’m explaining, not arguing.

Bots are cheap, and Lemmy is growing. It would be foolish for them not to get in on this early.

All I can say is I’m not a bot. What you want to believe is up to you.

If you want to take the issue of social media manipulation seriously, you need to take a moment to consider who is best positioned and best motivated to carry out these operations. The vast majority of the English-speaking social media platforms are headquartered in Silicon Valley, domiciled in the US. This includes TikTok. Despite all the hippie California Ideology bullshit, the Valley has been closely linked with the Pentagon since its inception (See Palo Alto by Malcom Harris, or Surveillance Valley by Yasha Levine as two examples of this history.) Today, these giant tech firms still live off the teat of military contracts. From Microsoft to Google to Amazon.

The social media platforms enjoy a regime of immense power and nil regulations. There are a lot of ways the state could cause these companies pain if it were interested, from rescinding contracts to imposing regulation, to engaging in some bona fide anti-trust litigation, but this doesn’t happen because they have an understanding. These companies collaborate with the state in surveillance, they install figures like Jessica Ashooh at Reddit - straight out of the Atlantic Council - to run moderation policy. They facilitate counterinsurgency by sweeping up disclosures like the Blue Leaks and shutting down dissident communities in the midst of large scale civil unrest. They flood these platforms with war propaganda when it is convenient, lay the seeds of doubt whenever US interests are challenged abroad. They allow floods of fake users to post positively about US-aligned coups like the one in Bolivia, or the SOSCuba nonsense. We literally have military formations who’s sole task is to manipulate opinion on social media.

These are the people manipulating public opinion on social media. They are the ones holding the keys to the platforms. The ones who DECIDE what the algorithm is going to show you day after day after day. The ones who let shitholes like r/The_Donald to run roughshod for years, then ban communities like r/ChapoTrapHouse in the middle of the biggest domestic protest movement in US history. The ones who remove moderators from places like r/PresidentialRaceMemes and replace them with ideologues from r/Neoliberal to ensure the website closes ranks against the most underwhelming candidate and political vision conceivable for the moment.

Seriously consider the power held by the people operating these platforms. What they believe. What their material interests are. Who they network with. Who they do business with. What constraints exist to severely punish them if they undermine the interests of state. Consider that, and balance that against the overblown panic about foreign influence bots. Which one do you think has a bigger impact?

States are massive, chaotic social systems. I’m not going to say that foreign influence ops don’t occur, because within each state there are competing factions with different interests. But consider China is much more concerned with domestic conditions within their country than they are about what a bunch of Redditors, who they have blocked, think about them anyway. Consider the same about Russia. Consider the disparity in power these countries have to manipulate infrastructure owned and operated in the United States compared to the people who actually own it, and the state agencies which have the jurisdiction to destroy these firms if they step out of line.

first and second off lmfao

third off yeah im pretty sure a plurality of users here are veterans in their late 20s to early 30s of the mid-2000s cultural miasma

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There’s definitely a lot of SomethingAwful influence in our culture. /R/chapotraphouse, the subreddit whose banning spawned our website, had a ton of that energy too.

It would be foolish for them not to get in on this early

China has never been very good at English soft power projection

it do smell like :10bux: in here

Hard to be inclusive when the response to almost anything and everything is to call someone a “shitlib” and dip, unless you mean inclusively exclusive by insulting everyone.

When you live in a society where then entirety of mainstream discourse is between one side rainbow-washing carpetbombers and the other side calling that rainbow-washing evidence of an evil queer agenda, it sure should look like anyone repeating mainstream talking points is a shitlib.

What really puts the nail in that coffin, though, is the very extreme support Hexbear has for China, unless, again, you are comfortable denying everyone basic human rights so it’s considered inclusive.

Sticking to the queer topic, this is like when people used to concern troll about Cuba because it had laws in the '70s that were as homophobic as the typical western country, but that has become more difficult in the last few years as it has taken up – to my knowledge – the most progressive, inclusive family code in the world.

China right now is perhaps slightly behind the average western country in this respect, but there is a clear positive trend.

Supporting China is normal and good. Sorry there aren’t any mods here to make it seem like your bazinga brain views are popular.

Ok, which HumanRights ™️ are we talking about?

Hard to be inclusive if you let bigoted shitlibs do their thing without pushback .

idk i’m a trans lesbian and i have been on hexbear for 3 years and never been insulted or made to feel unwelcome on account of my identity a single time

now if by “inclusive” you mean “tolerant of right-wing bullshit” then no, we’re not, and we never will be

Hard to be inclusive when the response to almost anything and everything is to call someone a “shitlib” and dip, unless you mean inclusively exclusive by insulting everyone.

As a trans woman, i’ve never felt safe in liberal spaces, and the reason for that is largely debatebro shitheads like you who violently fight back against anything that challenges your notion of living in the best of all possible worlds, which reliably happens to include my own experiences with and thoughts on transphobia, mysogyny, classism and other forms of structural oppression and their intersections. Anytime i’ve done that in public online spaces that aren’t exclusively trans, i’ve been browbeaten, called into doubt and silenced. I’ve never had that on hexbear. Let’s not even begin with the fact that i’ve never had to explain to a hexbear mod what constitutes transphobia because half of the mod team is trans themselves, or that pronoun tags are mandatory, or that we’ve systematically banned anybody making a fuss about either of that.

Hexbear has actually put in the work to be a queer-inclusive space. And it has done that precisely by being brutally intolerant and absolutely belligerent to queerphobes instead of doing the liberal thing of empty gestures of tolerance while upholding the status quo that maims us. Meanwhile, anything you’ve ever done on lemmy is posting passive-aggressive one-liners and anti-communist garbage. Go fuck yourself.

Inclusive of marginalized groups, not liberalism

We are explicitly anti liberalism given that it supports an inherently discriminatory economic system (capitalism).

I’m a bisexual trans girl whose found this space to be the most accepting space I’ve ever been in on the internet (including many exclusively trans spaces).

Also many of us are not as pro China as we seem from the outside, I’m a lot more critical of china than many of the other hexbear users and we have a decent number of anarchists who post here, however we close ranks against imperialist narratives pushing for a right wing coup of the Chinese government because regardless of our differing ideologies we all agree that would be awful for the Chinese people.

lol ”basic human rights”

I bet you’re over on fantasizing about grinding homeless people into a slurry right now.

Lifting 800 million people out of poverty is denying them human rights, damn Europe must be a gulag compared to that

Hexbear is the most inclusive instance. If it’s hard to be inclusive then we’re just fucking great at it

Its possible for us to disagree about china without ripping each others heads off, I’ve been doin it for years

Getting called on the specific shit they’re doing:

“you just accuse everyone of [the shit I’m doing]!”

Hard to be inclusive when the response to almost anything and everything is to call someone a “shitlib” and dip, unless you mean inclusively exclusive by insulting everyone.

Gonna need to second the other posters pointing out that as a trans person this is by far the most queer inclusive space I’ve ever been on the internet. I’ve been around for 3 years because it’s actually a breath of fresh air scrolling through interactions between people without having to tolerate the high baseline misogyny and hitler particles present in the rest of the internet.

I mean, he is a centrist. He doesn’t even want to abolish capitalism.

here’s how Bernie can still win:

A number of people use both

It was Just the server for a good few months before the lemmy came up right?

Some of us saw right through that shit immediately though

Not sure if I made it clear enough, but I meant it became more obvious once the war started going badly and the weapons of mass destruction had not turned up.

Same thing happened in Vietnam. In fact, public opinion only really changed after the politicians started saying that it was ‘time to scale down US involvement’ or whatever, which only came years after many people in the Whitehouse realised the war was unwinnable. In the meantime, and despite all the famous protests and anti-war marches, the public was pretty happy to follow the official line that America was the good guy and that communism had to be stopped.

You could do an interesting analysis of this phenomenon using Gramsci’s idea of Cultural Hegemony as a framing device.

Thanks for posting this. This is another great case that illustrates how western media manipulation happens.