Hexbear is legitimately filled with right wing trolls pretending to be leftists.
It’s more than just extreme. There are several… really continuously happening examples of them spouting off straight up GOP and Russian information warfare which is very far removed from anything resembling their alleged politics. And this is taking into consideration their silly “imperialism is when USA” framework, and their penchant for accelerationism *and* their particularly outdated view of leftist philosophy.
There are two possibilities here - they are either so out of touch and steeped in anti-liberalism that they’ve come full circle to becoming a far right safe space, or a significant portion of their user base are trolls.
yeah, I don’t doubt they repeat the propaganda. I think they’re just a part of the pipeline as opposed to being directly fed propaganda.
Tankies like Modern Russia because Russia opposes the US. If anything opposes the US, even if that thing is opposite of their ideals, then they’ll still support them.
They don’t have complex views, just full-circle.
I’m not unconvinced that the whole leftist presence on that federated side of Lemmy is a psyop.
Lemmy is far too small and unimportant to attract any governments or psyops. Extremism comes in all flavours.
Or it’s the perfect, extremely cost effective training ground for Russian propagandists before they get promoted to Facebook and Reddit.
The main dev instance is literally a safe space for Russian and Chinese propaganda. Why is this so difficult to believe?
My bet is on troll factory workers slinging ideas around to see what and who sticks, and then they continue to sling ideas with their growing group. That was what the early days strategy of The_Donald on reddit were.
It doesn’t matter that lemmy is relatively unimportant, what matters to them is having a testbed for what is and isn’t sticking along with growing a crowd of supporters they might be able to take elsewhere where it matters.
