MeanwhileOnGrad
"Oh, this is calamity! Calamity! Oh no, he's on the floor!"
Welcome to MoG!
Meanwhile On Grad
Documenting hate-speech, conspiracy theories, apologia/revisionism, and general tankie behaviour across the fediverse
What is a Tankie?
Alternatively, a detailed blog post about Tankies.
(caution of bias)
Basic Rules:
Sh.itjust.works Instance rules apply! If you are from other instances, please be mindful of the rules. — Basically, don't be a dick.
Hate-Speech — You should be familiar with this one already; practically all instances have the same rules on hate speech.
Apologia — (Using the Modern terminology for Apologia) No Defending, Denying, Justifying, Bolstering, or Differentiating authoritarian acts or endeavours, whether be a Pro-CCP viewpoint, Stalinism or any variation of Tankie Ideology.
Revisionism — No downplaying or denying atrocities past and present. Calling Tankies shills, foreign/federal agents, or bots also falls under this rule. Extremists exist. They are real. Do not call them shills or fake users.
Tankies can explain their views but may be criticised or attacked for them. Any slight infraction on the rules above will immediately earn a warning and possibly a ban.
If you're violating instance rules, you'll typically be warned. Continuing poor behaviour after being warned will result in a ban or removal of your comments. Bans typically only last seven days, but repeat infractions will have longer sentences. You may ask to be unbanned.
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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.
That is a fascinating theory
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).