I know they’ve always been on Lemmy, but it seems like the past few weeks it’s slowly increasing, making me want to just stay on beehaw /local. Showing up on more communities, even on instances that ban that type of trolling explicitly.
Anyone else notice this?
Note: When I’m saying Tankie here, I’m not referring to far leftists, socialists, anti-capitalists, etc. I’m talking about trolls that act leftist but their actual intent is to cause infighting and support authoritarian regimes. Sealioning, all that stuff.
I chose this instance to explicitly avoid having to deal with Tankies or RWNJs. I don’t think your characterization of Tankies as trolls trying to divide the Left is accurate, though, they’re just auth-Lefties. There’s nothing inherently anti-authoritarian about the Left; most people on here aren’t anarchists, for instance, so they’re a hell of a lot more authoritarian than I’m okay with, but I don’t think that makes them fake Progressives or Leftists.
My biggest issue with Tankies, and what makes them so damn frustrating, is that most of them just straight deny reality in order to avoid admitting that they just don’t care what their authoritarian government(s) do. Makes it impossible to have an actual productive debate with someone when they know you’re right but don’t care, and won’t admit it.
A good portion of them are absolutely paid foreign agents/LLMs pushing political extremes in order to divide the US and some European countries.
They masquerade as communists, fascists, anarchists, and more.
This could mean anything, it’s essentially a moving target. Do you mean “a majority”? Because that would be a hell of a claim, sans evidence.
There are a lot of different views out there, and if you just assume that people who (even massively) disagree with you, despite being on the same rough political “side”/“axis”, are trolls, you’re probably just building a little echo chamber of beliefs. The “Left” encompasses a LOT of different views, many of which don’t play nicely with each other.
Are there sophisticated agitprop accounts for state actors out there? Of course. Can you readily identify their accounts, or attribute individual posts to larger campaigns? If you’re being honest, no you can’t.
It’s been very good on Beehaw for avoiding them so far, they seem to just be straying out more and more to other communities lately.
That’s fair, most of the times I’ve seen them has been from hexbear and spamming that pig image and just dogpiling people so I was under the impression that it was almost entirely trolls, that combined with not understanding how someone can unironically support authoritarian governments behavior or act fully oblivious to it
Not knowing what “that pig image” is makes me think my choice to limit myself to Beehaw was the correct one. :)
I thought this as well until in college when I became good friends with a Chinese guy, and started hanging with him and other students from China. It was wild sometimes how they would say shit that you just couldn’t believe, but was just normal to them, and not just in denial about stuff (I didn’t bring up “sensitive” topics like Xinjiang or censorship with them), but just like casually saying the numerous homeless people around (in San Francisco) should be disposed of, and you’re like screaming in your head while they laugh about it.
I talked with that friend years later, after he’d been working and living here for about a decade, and he was like, “man, some of the stuff I used to believe was crazy”, and I was basically like, “I didn’t want to say it, but yeeeeaaaaah.”
I’m not sure they’re even that, to me it seems like it’s people with so much hatred of their life that they then blame on western culture, which means they much criticise anything the west do and praise anything the enemies or alternatives to the west do, including praising authoritarians and terrorists as they’re against the west and so are fighting for the same cause
I think there’s a lot of “letting your rhetoric eat itself” in Tankie circles, where they let their performative support of ML rhetoric become more and more extreme, and more and more exclusivist, until the only rhetoric that remains is “ML good, non-ML bad”. It’s almost like a self-imposed descent into Orwellian NewSpeak (or the affirmative language of the Ascians, if you prefer Wolfe).
I don’t like Capitalism or Imperialism or Settler-Colonialism, and would prefer we all collectively adopt a Mutualist (or other ansoc structure) system, but I can acknowledge that not everyone within this shitty system is attempting to reify and strengthen it, and I don’t make espousal of my specific brand of resistance a litmus test to tell whether other people are good or
capitalistbad.