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.
So glad this thread could become such a perfect microcosm of why we need to defederate.
You asked about us. We came out in force to answer you. Why is that surprising or evidence of anything? We don’t have a downvote feature, so we’re used to responding when we disagree. And of course we’re going to defend ourselves.
Its so funny how you guys became so used to being able to live in an echo chamber of western capitalist propaganda on reddit, then moved here, then had that bubble popped by us and lemmygrad, then became INCREDIBLY DESPERATE to get away from opinions you previously were sheltered from. Its just a funny reaction to witness. Meanwhile, liberalism is something I can never really escape. Because its everywhere. I dont actually have the option to completely unplug.
Anyway, if your instance defeded lemmygrad I have no doubt you’ll get your way with us sooner rather than later.
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.
Honestly, federation with Hexbear has improved my Lemmy experience 1000%. I think it would be silly to defederate because a vocal minority of libs don’t like their worldview to be challenged. You can individually block the instance if you don’t appreciate the vibe.
As far as I can tell they embrace leftist unity which is something we could all use more of.
the instance is less than a month old
smartest, most well researched midwesterner
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.
They are, it’s called the capitalist class.
And your information is incorrect, hexbear is one of the oldest Lemmy instances, and we’ve always been among the most active. My account is over 3 years old. It’s just that we only federated recently.
It’s so strange how all the rich news companies would report in a way that supports the interests of rich people. So weird!
I, for one, welcome our new HexBear overlords!
And we welcome our new peons
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and one of them is shit talking SMB so I hope you don’t get it and get turned off.
Oh did I mention I’m also the admin of this instance? DEFED
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hi comrade we love you fr
We’re not overlords we’re just comrades in arms
Ah yes, the classic wealthy journalist. Everyone knows that reporting is where the big bucks truly lie. I guess it’s impossible for literally anyone living anywhere but the like 3 countries that pretend to be communist to report on anything accurately.
who pays the journalists? who sets editorial policy? who prevents the journalists from unionizing?
Who fires them if they disobey orders, and shuts down the whole paper just to prevent competition from the rags they outright own?
Ford Foundation Carnegie Corporation
Lmao you just owned yourself with this link. I love when libs link wikipedia links they havent actually read.
Fair enough, I was wrong about ProPublica.
I’m sure you’ll find this quote from the Wikipedia entry on the Ford Foundation interesting:
“John J. McCloy, the architect of Office of Strategic Services that would later become Central Intelligence Agency served as the chairman of the Ford Foundation.[74] The CIA would channel its funds through Ford Foundation as a part of its covert cultural war.[75][76][77] John J. McCloy, serving as the chairman from 1958–1965, knowingly employed numerous US intelligence agents and, based on the premise that a relationship with the CIA was inevitable, set up a three-person committee responsible for dealing with its requests.[78][79] Writer and activist Arundhati Roy connects the foundation, along with the Rockefeller Foundation, with supporting imperialist efforts by the U.S. government during the Cold War.”
This is indeed interesting. What does that tell you about the state of western media?
Former CIA Agent John Stockwell Talks about How the CIA Worked in Vietnam and Elsewhere https://youtu.be/NK1tfkESPVY
Obv the military industrial complex grew significantly since the release of this
What does that tell you about the state of western media?
Trying to generalize based on a single example is poor reasoning.
YouTube: I don’t do YouTube, sorry, no offense to you or whatever you’re trying to convey.
While the Sandler Foundation provided ProPublica with significant financial support, it also has received funding from the Knight Foundation, MacArthur Foundation, Pew Charitable Trusts, Ford Foundation, the Carnegie Corporation, and the Atlantic Philanthropies.
Lol u can’t be serious
MacArthur Foundation
THAT MacArthur?!
Oh shit, a Wikipedia page.
I just want to point out how funny it is that you have zero points on this post considering none of the hexbear bRiGaDerS have the ability to downvote
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?
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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
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class is about your relationship to the means of production, not your income
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.
Same type of person. Careerist strivers who all accept the basic liberal version of history and society. The liberal version of history coincides with the reactionary version of history because they both refuse to question the premises of capitalism. That is they both agree more over capitalism and Western Hegemony more than they disagree about specific cultural issues. They don’t all have to be in the same room, coordinating on a narrative because they all share the same boundaries of inquiry. So the same kind of stuff gets written without active coordination. This is a roundabout way to say they’re all of the same class. They have class solidarity.
A liberal news source will talk about how good and downtrodden immigrants are. A conservative news source will talk about how all immigrants are drug dealers. But they don’t disagree that there both needs to be immigration or that it needs to be regulated. A good real world example of this is Democrats flipping out over Trump’s racism and then upping funding for “border security” and advocating for a tech wall. Neither question the fundamental assumptions about immigration. Both advocate for the same idea, just in different abstractions. Nobody actually thinks the person who writes a bleeding heart article gets up from their chair and sits at a different desk where they write about caravans of cartel members. Though you do get the same person/organization drifting into sounding like their opposition, like the NYT. Which illustrates, again, that they’re the same class and ultimately share the same goals and fears.
It’s not a hard code to crack. You just have to be willing to actually question things and be curious. But there’s a lot of resentment in doing that (displayed here) because part of the media is propagandizing poor people and getting them adopt the same goals and fears as the upper classes. The people in government right now spent decades selling off your jobs and livlihood to cheaper areas of the world. Because it benefited them. One of those places was China. Capitalists gave China everything they needed to become what they are. It was fun when sowing. Now, because of problems in the West, China must become a talking point and scapegoat. The rich don’t like them because they’re closing themselves off from foreign investment and they’re not playing ball with our foreign policy. That is they pose a threat to unite with other countries and close off investment as well. If US companies can’t set up shop in Taiwan, for example, that hurts wealthy people in the US. You don’t have that wealth or investment so that argument won’t work on you. Therefore the problem must be abstracted and layered under a bunch of cultural or moral arguments. So you get stories about how the Chinese are all savage bug people who work like robots to overthrow your way of life. They’re violating your liberal ideals of free speech. They’re detaining Muslims so they’re too racist. They don’t like LGTBT people. They ruin your bitcoin gambling. They kill their people by cooking in sewage oil and their buildings fall down.
This is to get you to share opposition to China so that by the time we work ourselves into a War, you won’t really question why your children are fighting in it. They’ll go die so that US companies can keep pumping out resources from those countries and keep the competition out. All the sentiments about honor and duty and security and freedom are a lie.
I don’t think that the CCP cares enough about Lemmy to make bots. Lmao.
We are a leftist community that has existed for about 3 years before we federated.
The stuff we believe and discuss are leftist talking points you would hear in any ML org.
Have you ever spoken to any actual, theory-reading leftists or have you only ever spoken to Neoliberal Democrat types? Because from a political science point of view, Dems are not leftists, they’re capitalists.
I swear we are not scary people, we are just really, really frustrated with the capitalist status quo and the liberal bullshitting some people use to defend it.
Bots are cheap, and Lemmy is growing. It would be foolish for them not to get in on this early.
You are right, of course, that leftism != liberalism. But just saying that doesn’t count as an argument. I haven’t yet seen what Menachem is complaining about, but I will be paying attention.
EDIT: On further read, you guys kind of feel at the very least like the left-wing equivalent of somethingawful.com.
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 honestly not sure if I mean that as a compliment or not. They’re exactly what it says on the tin, but you can’t deny they’re an effective bunch.
It’s kind of an ironic thing to say these days considering how many leftists there are on SA.
Yeah, I lurk their tg boards to read tongue in cheek white wolf rpg reviews and I can think of at least one fairly prolific poster who is definitely some kind of socialist, probably a communist.
I know literally nothing about the non-elfgames parts of the site though.
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.
I’m not saying you are a bot, merely that your argument is weak.
What argument? All I’ve done is politely explain who we are
Jesus Christ libs really think everything is an argument to sell them something. Lmao absolute consumer brain. What capitalism does to a motherfucker.
will the debate pervertry never cease
She did a strawman, she did a no true Scotsman, she did an ad hominem
Purge yourself of this brain rot
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.
Saving this one.
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
Exception in thread "main" IllegalArgumentException: 23 at parseLlamaTokens.main(parseLlamaTokens.java:28)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.
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it do smell like :10bux: in here
But to Complicated for th West to use , CIA simply doesnt have the Budget… Only Iran does !
So many visible pronouns to upbear in this thread.
We’re posters. We’re active.
Honestly if reading views that are different to your own in posts that reach the federation /all/ page is a problem why leave reddit? One of the best things about this place is it NOT being a bubble of liberal-only thought where people jerk each other off all the time. Have conversations with us, realise that we have evidence for everything we say. I’m happy to chat to anyone.
Stalin defeated fascism
Everything that doesn’t confirm my bias: Bots from the CCP!
Everything that confirms my bias: reliable western sources!
We’ve existed for three years but about a month ago we converted to upstream lemmy so that’s probably why it says we’re only a month old.
As a community our focus is to be a radically queer inclusive (literally more than half our mods are trans or enby and most of the cis mods are some flavour of gay or bi) space for leftist unity that heavily discourages lurking (which is probably why our posts are so visible because no one really just downvotes and moves along when they see a comment they don’t like - we literally don’t even have a downvote option)
We federated like a week ago and so I think our users are still letting the urge to dunk out of their systems, personally I can’t really be bothered with all that (except with one guy that came into our instance and started slinging around homophobia at the users and immediately got dogpiled) I’m mostly just posting on the cool queer communities on lemmy.blahaj.zone
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.
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.
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.
Ok, which HumanRights ™️ are we talking about?
Supporting China is normal and good. Sorry there aren’t any mods here to make it seem like your bazinga brain views are popular.
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 if you let bigoted shitlibs do their thing without pushback .
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.
lol ”basic human rights”
I bet you’re over on
fantasizing about grinding homeless people into a slurry right now.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.
Inclusive of marginalized groups, not liberalism
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
🥰
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.
Getting called on the specific shit they’re doing:
“you just accuse everyone of [the shit I’m doing]!”
We’ve been around for literally 3 years bro. You’re the new kid here.
Also lemmy was literally partially created by our users. You’re the one coming into our space.
when Xi Jinping offers to pay ur rent, its hard to say no
We’ve been here for 3 years, before 99% of lemmitors even knew what a Lemmy was. Chapo trap house got banned from reddit, so we made a site here. Our site’s code diverged from og Lemmy so we could add things like pronoun tags, and only recently had been made into a version compatible with federation. We’ve had time to make our own site culture of posting, whereas the rest of lemmitors are fresh off of reddit. Being suspicious of hexbear posting a lot after federation is like being suspicious of water flowing after a dam bursts.
Seriously just click on the profiles of every pisspants liberal complaining about us and the longest they’ve been on the site is usually 2 months.
American tourists rolling in and demanding everything be how they like it.
water flowing after a dam bursts
