To celebrate August 24 Vladimir Zelensky took to Instagram to upload a series of portraits of commanders born in post-Soviet Ukraine.
Unsurprisingly one serviceman’s image, alongside his full name and credentials, was pictured wearing a Nazi insignia of the 14th Waffen-SS Grenadier Division.
That unit of the SS recruited primarily Ukrainian collaborators, and has been accused of committing several massacres in Poland.
As I said, I don’t search for this at all. Work on your reading comprehension.
You do know how search engines work nowadays, right?.. If you use a stock-market smartphone that you haven’t tinkered with (in terms of PSA), your fingerprint and most of the data is fed to the ‘system’ (ML optimizations mostly, to put it simply). You may use *UNIX/*BSD/Linux-like system, send all your traffic through a bunch of I2P/TOR/whatever nodes, sitting behind 7 proxies on some Pakistani server. You are still getting somewhat ‘optimized’ results for any query you put to whatever search engine (DDG, Brave, searX — doesn’t matter). Until you are completely, technically and socially cut off from the popular information ‘channels’, you are going to be influenced by the agenda you are targeted with by other parties (either manually or by some complex algo). And here you are, saying, quote: “…every time there’s a picture of Ukrainian soldier in the media they’re inevitably covered in nazi symbols…” Well, do you want me to show you the Ukrainian soldiers’ images w/o Nazi-like insignia? Or do you think it’s impossible? Change my mind.
P.S. Maybe, you should be way less “they are all Nazi!”, and be more objective on the matter. Just a friendly advice, pal.
This is literally the Instagram account of the freaking leader of the country. This isn’t “optimization” or “targeted.” If nazis aren’t so prevalent how can Zelensky’s official social media not avoid posting WAFFEN INSIGNIAS???
Easy. Politicians are sometimes dumb and uneducated. If you are not into SS insignia, you’d never think it is. The first thing that comes to my mind is some outdated French royal/noble family symbol. And I don’t recall Zelensky has a Master degree in European history or something.
The SERPs really are not this personalised. Social media and youtube on the other hand very much is but the SERPs are not except in the case of searches where it recognises the need to optimise based on local geographical location. You are very much overstating this with regards to search engines.
Let me elaborate my distrusts towards search engines…
Now, let’s presume you use a self-hosted SE. Maybe, you are an ex-Google employee who worked on their SE for years and who wrote a new SE. Call me a paranoiac, but in the world somewhat dominated by big tech and industry companies, I presume it’s possible to keep ‘unwanted’ content further away from certain groups or individuals. I mean, your SE still tries to find the results in the existing global infrastructure — is it possible SEs are given not the full picture with intent?..
P.S. Writing this, I understood I don’t really know what’s going on under the hood along the way. However, it doesn’t really change my initial point (before tech ‘details’) that the person I wasn’t agree with only wants to see what he wants to see (not the first time, BTW), completely ignoring others’ points of view.
Yes there is plenty of reason to distrust search engines.
But to extrapolate that into what is essentially an argument you are making that google is putting more ukrainian nazis in front of my friend over there is nonsense. Google and other western tech companies are all nato-aligned businesses that know their interests lie with exploitation of global resources and expanding the western means to achieve that. They know that the war hurts them and they actively take part in suppressing negative news and information to the contrary while promoting western nato-aligned content in support of it.
The real bubbles lie on social media. My information bubble on twitter will be vastly different to yours, my search results probably won’t.
None of this however changes the fact that you’ll find nazis throughout the Ukrainian military at all levels. To put in perspective the HUGE extent of support for nazi ideology in Ukraine you only need to look at this 2014 poll of support for Stepan Bandera, leader of the OUN who carried out the nazi holocaust within Ukraine during ww2. 31% of the population supported Bandera when this poll was taken, while 48% was negative to him largely residing in the Luhansk, Crimea and Donetsk regions who went into secessionism or civil war shortly after this poll was taken. Even if we ignore the fact that these three regions make up the majority of Bandera haters you can still consider the following - If there’s a photo of 3 soldiers, one of them is a nazi that supports Stepan Bandera. The likelihood is at minimum 31% in the entire population. And this completely disregards the fact that the military attracts ultranationalists.
Debatable. But I’m too exhausted to discuss it ATM. If you want, you can hit me up later (in PM?).
Popular social media do create bubbles, indeed. However, the problem here is that some people just don’t use anything else: I’ve seen reports on how new generations use TikTok and Instagram as their SEs. We can conduct a little experiment on the latter just to be sure. I mean, if our SERPs would be similar or different.
I don’t say there are no neo-Nazis in Ukraine and its army. I’ve just stated there are neo-Nazi on both sides of this war conflict. If you want to appeal to such polls, I think you won’t be surprised there are weirder (and more grotesque) stuff going because of how some people are violent (un-empathetic) and other people are just being ignorant. I spoke with some Chinese about their government — imagine my surprise (oh, I was naïve) they were completely brainwashed while being completely ignorant about politics. I can imagine folks in Russia don’t even know what atrocities have happened during the 1920s and 1945+, 1960s… Ah, and the Lynch postcards in the US — I don’t think people even remember that.
This is just racism. You literally just called an entire population brainwashed when they are anything but.
Brainwashed on what exactly? In what way. You can’t say something so blatantly racist without expanding and justifying it.
Ehm, I didn’t?.. I said I spoke with a few Chinese folks — they were defending their government’s actions (repressive politics against disbelievers with all kinds of cyber-fascism, camps for Uyghurs, the whole Tibet, Taiwan, etc.) no matter what. When I started asking questions with if and that, they showed they don’t understand the topic whatsoever.
Probably that’s because it wasn’t racist.
That’s extremely vague. Please be more specific? I would like to know, specifically what you think they were ““brainwashed”” about. All you’ve done here is list a bunch of extremely vague topics. What about those topics?
How did you think randomly adding anti-chinese racism to a comment not about china would make any sense? WTF?
I’ve already provided plenty of references in this thread. Go read them.
Do you want me to provide similar articles about the whole Europe being covered in brown? Then the USA? And Asian countries? And Russia, too? Will it prove those countries are neo-Nazi havens? Nope. There are far-right all over the world. The crisis only makes it worse. What you want to focus, however, is that Ukraine is a Nazi state with people there supporting Nazism. How many friends and relative do you have in Ukraine, BTW? Have they been marching under Nazi insignia since 2013-2014? I don’t think so. Do you want to know what I think? Ukraine has been going towards becoming a national state like Israel for years. You don’t need to be the smartest person in the world to get that. Ukraine has [far-]right paramilitary groups and actual army regiments, they are strong. But what’s more important, they are the vanguard, frontline and in the hearts. Imagine what, in the people’s eyes, those combatants were right about being an enemy to Russia. And looks like the government of Ukraine chose the lesser evil (from their perspective). Again, it’s not some Nazi state. But those warriors were right, and they are defending their country. Well, that’s the narrative for the Ukrainians at least. Again, you don’t see even a 10% of all the combatants. They’ve learned their lesson and stopped sending anti-OpSec information. And, it seems, neither you know plenty of them.
They went closer to being like the murderous occupiers of palestine? Very evil. Very fascist.
What kind of asinine argument is that.
I could play this game, too. My reply is “what kind of asinine argument is that”.
If you don’t understand why making false equivalences is asinine what else is there to tell you.
If you’d be a good-willed sentient, you’d point out my mistakes, of course. I guess you aren’t.
Sorry, I’m not going to take any of your precious time writing even more posts w/o really considering others’ opinions. Neither I’m going to waste mine.
Others in this thread already addressed all your points. No reason to keep feeding a troll.