Please post articles related to the debate here. New posts about the debate will be removed as duplicates.
Discussions are welcome and encouraged!
Please post articles related to the debate here. New posts about the debate will be removed as duplicates.
Discussions are welcome and encouraged!
The mods have already deleted his stuff here, so I can’t see it, but from some time on here reading Linkerbaan’s past posts and comments, I think that he just really dislikes Israel and that one issue dominates pretty much all his comments. I don’t agree with him at all, but I don’t think that he’s just aiming to do a hit job on Harris so much as that he’s not going to agree with any politician or country that doesn’t take a pretty strongly anti-Israel approach and doesn’t care about Harris-vs-Trump compared to that.
If anyone is actually paying him, which I doubt very much – Russian influence campaigns that I’ve seen disinformation researchers report on in the past tend to have people just posting generic talking points and not actually engage with people, too expensive to run – I’d think that it’d be Iran or someone like that, not Russia. Russia doesn’t care about Israel, other than to the limited degree that it might be used as a wedge issue on the US or something like that.
To add some context: linkerbaan means ‘left lane’ in Dutch, so he’s quite clear about his bias. It’s just unfortunate he’s not open to reasonable interaction
I thought that too, until I noticed him telling outright lies. Thwn, later, he posted an anti-Ukrainian YT video in English, but when you looked at the video the title was auto-translated to Russian. What does that tell you?
Hmm.
Well, I haven’t seen that Ukrainian video, and maybe that’d be interesting to see, but the overwhelming mass of his content is complaining about Israel. And I don’t think this is a crowd pleaser to just try to get friendly with people who have a beef with Israel and then unload anti-Ukraine content on them – like, he isn’t aiming for uncontroversial, crowd-pleasing stuff.
There are a number of people floating around on here – starting with the lead developer of Lemmy and a whole host of people on lemmygrad.ml – who are a lot more-prominently in favor of Moscow running Ukraine.
goes to look at his comment history
He’s got a lot of complaining about Israel, some complaining about people complaining about Middle Eastern stuff, some complaining about the Uyghyr situation.
Like, if I had to make a guess, I’d go with maybe Muslim dude, has listened to material complaining about Israel for ages. Those are political cause célèbres for the Muslim world.
Using Kagi – which has a search engine for the Threadiverse – to look for Ukraine comments, it’s mostly him derailing discussion about Ukraine to insert complaints about Israel. Sometimes he’s arguing that the US should stop sending aid to Israel so that it can send more to Ukraine, which I’m skeptical is something that someone aiming to drive a pro-Kremlin agenda is going to do.
He’s submitted stuff like this:
https://p.lemmy.world/post/lemmy.world/17355455?thread=0.11059538.11063503.11064197
I don’t think that that reflects very favorably on Russia.
Based on what Russian state-run propaganda sites have put out over the course of the war, which isn’t the same as disinformation campaigns, but which I’d expect to have some correlation, topics that Russia favors, are more like:
Ukraine bad (Nazi/corrupt/exploiting the West/etc)
West or Western Europe bad, not to be trusted by Eastern Europe (anti-Slavic/exploitative)
Eastern Europe bad, not to be trusted by rest of West (e.g. Latvians actually Nazi…I remember that one being amplified by the Russian embassy in Canada on Twitter).
US bad, not to be trusted by Europe
UK bad, not to be trusted by rest of Europe
US on verge of collapse
US not appreciating how it may drive Russia to use nuclear weapons, being foolish
Russia misunderstood/bogus information being put out about Russia/Russia somehow being exploited
I mean, the topics that he deals with just don’t match up all that well with that. And my guess is that there’s a certain amount of cross-pollination among people complaining about the West and such just because of material crossing over in common media, so I can at least imagine that he just gets something indirectly from a pro-Russian source at some point. Like, that link you’re talking about could maybe have originated with someone targeting Ukraine and then had him just pick it up off random third-party media site.
Like, that’s obviously not a comprehensive analysis or anything, but…