As I am every time, I am genuinely baffled about who these people are.
Are they propaganda bots? Confused Westerners who have chosen the world’s weirdest “team” to be on and support uncritically (or been driven there by the very real shittiness of the Western system in some respects)? People from communist countries who are trying to cope? Trolls? Parody accounts? Something else?
I think that a lot of them are #2. But it just seems so weird and tragic all of them getting together every day on the internet to tell each other how awesome North Korea is. I am very curious to be able to sit down and have a face to face conversation with one and just see what’s in there.
I used to post on r/pyongyang. It was a lot of veiled sarcasm praising the regime, famine, prison camps, etc. Every once in a while someone new would show up confused. Depending on their responses, they would either be attacked as capitalist shill pigs, or ‘gaslit’ with more posts praising NK in comparison to the free world.
I don’t get that vibe from this group. But I could be wrong.
Seeing how anytime is Hamas is criticized here, the critic is given a torrent of down votes yet nobody ever really responds to the criticism, I think bots are almost certainly an issue here.
Confused Westerners who have chosen the world’s weirdest “team” to be on and support uncritically (or been driven there by the very real shittiness of the Western system in some respects)?
‘Confused’ is a strong word. But they’re overwhelmingly privileged Westerners who have transitioned from the Manichean millenarianism of suburban American evangelical Christianity to a mirror image. The same in every way except orientation.
Their endless parade of apocalyptic proclamations and screeds on how we deserve the coming collapse for the sin of existing are… quite familiar to anyone who used to be in evangelical communities.
Nah, I think Lemmy is treated as a training ground. Think about this - if an actual Russian or Chinese state propaganda agency approached Dessalines and offered to fund Lemmy development in exchange for getting their agents on the admin list, how quickly would he nut himself?
Lmao. State secrets are a patriotic duty, comrade. But you are right, they could definitely just infiltrate the instance with a sufficient number of terminally online information warriors.
Yes, a significant portion of them are high fiving over their cubicle walls in Russia and China. I am convinced that Lemmy is a training ground for these efforts before they get moved up to Facebook and reddit.
It’s pretty easy to spot the difference between the propagandists and the teenagers though. Teenagers are not well connected to history or world events and clearly just work within their very small bubble of edgy contrariness. The propagandists have a broader self awareness and regurgitate or even connect multiple talking points much more skillfully. Though on Lemmy, “skillfully” needs some qualification, since there is a lot of really bad and transparent propaganda here. Like I said, it’s clearly the practice squad, with a handful of higher profile lieutenants.
Like a lot of these things there is absolutely no way to know, but it would explain why they are even paying attention to Lemmy at all (to a degree that to me makes 0 sense relative to its trivial level of actual popularity), and I’ve seen people where it’s clearly their first day handling the account (like posting some “things in North Korea are actually great” meme out of nowhere on an account that’s always before been domestic US politics stuff).
They all have .ml and .world accounts now too. If you dig through hexbear you can find plenty of threads straight up exhorting the creation of troll alts.