So I said a few days ago that I would make a post on this issue, and it got delayed as I was running busy with family. Apparently some people like @helix got no chill. @Sightline@lemmy.ml, here you go.
chat replies
Nonetheless, whilst not getting too distracted from the birds, let me start off with a month long analysis of soferman’s posting and commenting, from a month ago.
I will mention that my guess is that they are a Western European in a country from GMT +1 to GMT +3 countries. Easy OSINT, backhand stuff for me.
POSTS
posting started 2 weeks ago
CBS, BBC, Guardian, Vice
more posting
more posting
NYT, Al Jazeera...
Liberal News echo chamber gets created
The Independent, damn
and thats the end of it
I think it is easily noticeable what the sources of link posting mean here, combined with the fact that Lemmy has a small userbase with a global feed that used to get spammed twice a day with this stuff for more than an entire week.
The websites are all pro imperialist news outlets with an inherent geopolitical bias over dissing on and running disinformation campaigns against anti-Anglo countries, particularly Middle and East Asia. These centralised news outlets consist of few owners, those being Council of Foreign Relations (CFR), Bilderberg owners, Murdoch (Australian media) and whatever is part of US Agency for Global Media (USAGM), a CIA arm for creation and dissemination of news propaganda.
Moreover, there was being shilled heavily a biased fact checker called MediaBiasFactCheck, which takes ad revenue from Google Analytics and has factually incorrect ratings of non Western news outlets, as they use the classic tactic of omission of argument in favour of Western nes outlets and call non Western news outlets a kind of state propaganda. More onto it as I explain the…
COMMENTS
This is going to be hell. So I will try and get these out of the way first, so a better understanding of chronology can be developed on what the liberal echo chamber infiltration wants to achieve on Lemmy.
targeting post 1
targeting post 2
another targeting post 1 day later
I am unsure when creating a partisan political divide between a community was an allowed thing on any forum on the internet. Cannot remember any such chatroom or forum in the last 2 decades, unless it was some kind of Gab or Parler (where you would anyway feel cornered and unproductive), where at this point such a person would not be kicked out.
Anyway, admins and authoritarian defenders are fake, bad tankies! They must defend Western liberal democracy, bad people! Moving on to mister world champion’s comments on threads…
biden Afghan war thread
I love how our libman threw around the word “nuance”, trying to look proficient in this debate, while calling the Afghanistan basecamps a baseless conspiracy theory, which have been a thing since 9/11. Definitely libman is right!
Uyghur genocide propaganda pushing
This fellow compared the admin and those of us wanting to verify minority genocide evidence as media illiterate people and neonazis. This fellow knew extremely well what comparing communists and anarchists to neonazis means, which will be verified in later comments. This is crucial in understanding how this fellow managed to paint a narrative on Lemmy in the past month.
muh ancom targeted
To anyone who lives in a cave, they could atleast read and tell what is going on by now. But I assume most people seriously lack basic skills of connecting the dots, since nobody except me was screaming what libman was doing.
China bad narrative pushed
Our boy actually wrote “China is pretty bad”. Guess where this narrative flourishes? r/worldnews on Reddit, where every week one anti China post gains 70k upvotes and 30 awards.
painting others as neonazis and telling them to video call on Jitsi, creepy
Dude is super creepy, besides hellbent on dividing people into political camps. Surprised they did not even get a warning from mods or admins. Easily could have been a ban or warning on Reddit.
posts "Taiwan namba wan" story, does not care if Taiwan is a country, calls me defender of authoritarianism...
...while defending NATO founded by neo nazis, in a posted news link where NATO official berates Putin, totally unbiased
It is clear they do not care about facts. They are just propping up Western manufactured narratives constantly at this point. The more sympathy libman gains for West, the more critics get suppressed. Hivemind tactics.
Also note in the latter post how soferman ONCE AGAIN intimidates commenters, this time by pinging the admin (WOW) into a live video chat on Jitsi. This would be an instant ban on any subreddit.
Also they dismiss others with “haha facts/logic on your side” or :/ emoticon everytime they lose a debate.
dismissing critical thinking, and trying to shill centralised biased fact checkers
This has only one goal – to degrade quality of posters and posting on Lemmy, and make everyone a brainless shitposter like the ones you find on r/worldnews or r/woahdude on Reddit. This in turn will make Lemmy look like a junkyard to anyone that comes here and sees the mess, and make them “go back to Reddit”.
Russia bad , dissent suppression global trend - New York Times
A quality (shit)post. I am sure this was enlightening and not totally a propaganda news article to label any critics of Western democracy “bad people”. Not at all. Does not sound like Fox News at all. No worries, upvote and move on.
calls Grayzone fake news and calls me conspiracist for knowing BBC, CNN etc push false geopolitical narratives
This is peak Reddit behaviour. This is also beyond false. This fellow is simply a propagandist. Nothing else explains it.
Russia Belarus narrative pushed once again
Even the admins took note of it well by now. This fellow cannot be this naïve. It should be clear to anyone that they know what they were doing.
China lab COVID conspiracy narrative pushed
Timing makes a lot of sense, when Western countries are trying hard to revive the debunked conspiracy theory last September. Either they do not know facts, or are shitposting to create chaos purposefully among people on Lemmy who do not subscribe to debunked conspiracies. This Steve Bannon is the same guy who proposed a China-free global internet.
This news article posting cannot be conceived as stimulating an honest discussion. Not when you continuously post opinions by NATO, British, American citizens and so on, and no opinions of Chinese, Russian, Indian or non Western leaders.
purposefully shilling biased fact checkers over thinking for oneself
Anyone should be able to notice a pattern with telling people to stop thinking for themself, while telling them at the same time to become dependent on biased fact checker websites with funding and/or employment from Google, Facebook et al. People that fall for this become shitposters like those at mainstream subreddits. Even 3-4 people that fall for it become followers of soferman’s ideas. Classic scouting tactics.
However, MBFC fact checker got debunked really hard here, as some users started to get pissed off from what was obvious here.
once again victimising NATO, USA West nations and calling admin an authoritarian defender
I do not think anyone should need an explanation for this.
someone made a thread about these conflicts in community, asking for solutions
part 2 of same thread
I challenged them to answer a list of questions I had, and the propaganda narratives libman kept spreading, and they downvoted and continued replying to others.
another thread asking for decency in community
Ah yeah everyone is a tankie! What kind of joke is that, considering the controversy you have generated around you in the past month?
(1/2) 5000 word limit, check part 2 as comment here https://lemmy.ml/post/69058/comment/59514
thank you for taking your time and making this, I hope this time all of all reach an agreement. I also hope admins participate in discussion.
tl;dr: I think it’s totally fine that soferman belives in sources that most lemmurs don’t trust, and I think they should be free to express their opinion and disagreement, but not in the form of spamming the front page or personal attacks. other users should also show their dissagreement in civil manner. regarding their ban, I think the ban shouldn’t have happened after eveyone had calmed down and moved on. it only made more drama and was not a good choice fom my point of view.
a wall of text that is more of a rambling:
I think while looking at soferman’s behavior we should understand their motivation, in my opinion such behavior is to be expected as more people join Lemmy. the current culture we have here is more of an eccentric counter culture, in almost all apects. most of us share ideas that are alien to average English speaking population. your average American uses proprietary software, centralised platforms, welcomes any kind of spyware in their life, has this very right wing geopolitical understanding of the world, etc. now we’re lucky, because we don’t deal with the average person, people who want decentralised platforms powered by FOSS join Lemmy.
now consider that soferman is from Norway, thus believes in some form of social-democracy, and shows interest in FLOSS, so they’re not anywhere near the average person we discussed.
now imagine a person who has been convinced China is the worst and most dangerous country in the world, is facing a lot of pro-China articles on the main page, and is facing some news outlets like the gray zone. it’s completely natural to battle this by posting articles from sources they’re used to. so I don’t think it’s a problem that soferman keeps posting “pro-imperialist” articles, to them it’s “normal”. (honestly I myself feel uncomfortable when I see some of the opinions on Lemmy, and that is fine, I’m not expecting other to magically change their worldview to match mine, but at the same time we can’t blame soferman for what they do).
but regarding their other undesirable behavior, I totally agree soferman is guilty of personal attacks, calling other to confront them “face to face” on jitsi, spamming agenda posts, and closing any debate by pointless comments like “ok, so logic/history is on your side”. do I think they deserved a ban for that? I would’ve been totally fine had they been banned when they asked people to meetbon jitsi or spammed the who front page. but being banned because they had a bad opinion during a conversation with an admin is not acceptable in my opinion. in other words, I think the timing of the ban makes it look bad. soferman had mostly changed their behavior, and everything was ok, then the ban happened and here we are.
I think personally the ban seems fair, from all this attacking, framing and homepage feed spamming they were doing. Not to mention look at the Liberal News renaming they did, to throw off everyone.
This is so WRONG.
I am not saying soferman needs to become a sheep for any narrative (which they kinda already are), but atleast do not handwave whenever “facts are on X or Y side” or try to create this rift in community. Moreover, telling people to dismiss critical thinking should be a literal crime.
It is not just about pro China, but pro Russia, pro socialist, and ANY non Western country that is not in line with USA or the 14 Eyes countries’ narratives, is what they keep attacking and run away whenever facts debunk their news posts or claims.
soferman’s behaviour has not changed, and is going to become more manipulative. I have the other post trending on homepage feed, have a look at it.
And yeah, this post was hellish to make T_T