Soon after I joined Lemmy a few years ago, I searched for communities based on my interests and subscribed to the ones with the highest numbers of users to ensure they are active. Sometimes I joined multiple, but then saw that some people post the same thing to more than one, cluttering my feed, so I left the smaller ones.
It’s only after my community ban from [email protected] for disagreeing about Ukraine that I was told about MeanwhileOnGrad, learning exactly what “the tankie triad” means and why big Lemmy instances have defederated from those. Lemmy.ml, where the ML probably stands for Marxist-Leninist, seems to have been defederated by fewer, possibly because it’s run by the creator of Lemmy, Dessalines. Nevertheless, there is evidence of Dessalines holding the same authoritarian communist views as the rest.
Recently, there were two posts on [email protected] about Signal, but then in both cases, admin davel (who is known on MoG for seeing CIA’s hand in running Ukraine, among other things) and Dessalines linked (1, 2, 3) the same article by Dessalines, which not only argues Signal could be a CIA honeypot (as if it matters when proper e2ee is used), but also manages to shoehorn China even into that, claiming its government “prefers autonomy”. This sort of portrayal of totalitarianism as sovereignty is the reason I unsubscribed from the community. As it has been said by others, ML is not a neutral instance but a means of pushing authoritarian views onto unsuspecting users.
Edit: Made the post title clearer.
I really am not sure what you mean - at least on Lemmy. I don’t see pro-western propaganda. In fact everyone is highly critical and self aware of the vast majority of the West’s moves and motives. Even articles of the rare positive moves are met with skepticism and pessimism.
The problem is that the tankies automatically attack any post by someone being critical of any other non-western nations as being hypocritical. An argument by hypocrisy. Annoying as hell, a yapping ankle-biting tiny dog constantly interrupting the conversation with “But the West did/does (insert awful thing) too!” when 99.99% of the time we’re well aware of the West’s failings, and those failings don’t mean other’s can’t be pointed out.
Pro western propaganda is often not just about promoting western countries. It also includes lying about enemies of the west. Pro western media also has a disproportionate focus on the faults of its enemies. It totality that kind of bias suggests there is an imbalance between the harms caused by the west and other countries leaning in the west’s favor.
I think plenty of westerners can identify the lies western media tells about the west. Thats easy enough to do given westerners have first hand experience living in western countries. Unfortunately, even well intentioned westerners are much worse at identifying those other forms of propaganda. As such, they have a hard time understanding geopolitical conflict between western nationals and other countries.
Personaly, I find the “argument by hypocrisy” isn’t really what critics of the west are doing. Instead, bringing up the harms caused by the west is meant to undermine the credibility of a western source and/or criticize it for its lack of focus on harms caused by the west. If you avoid jumping to accusations of “whataboutism” and engage in good faith, I’m confident many of the people you claim are “tankies” will give you a much more nuanced critique of the countries you think they’re reflexively defending.
Well articulated, great description of how Lemmy discourse ends up getting warped by its developers’ politics.