Lemmy has a strong tendency to criticize the US, and a lot of the critiques of certain issue with the US are valid. However, I started getting really tired of opening comment sections in innocuous and non-political posts only to see that someone somehow found a way to criticize the US in it. At first, I started thinking that maybe some Lemmy users are really unhappy and find criticizing a something stronger helped them feel better as if standing up to injustice was a passion of theirs. But, we don’t see them do that with other targets, just the US. The more I notice and think about it, I’m starting be suspicious that some of those users and comments aren’t authentic, but made to create divisiveness in the West and reject the US entirely. In other words, they may be Russian, Chinese, et al. agents working to feed a stream of propaganda in order to further cause chaos and lack of unity in the West as we have seen them do before.
Anyone else think about this?
This is what I’m thinking the game plan is:
- Criticize something obviously unjust that the US has done. Ignore that all other major powers have also committed atrocities.
- Link and liken it to other US matters & behaviors
- Paint the US entirely as evil so that nothing the US can do is just
- Attack anyone that supports anything out of the US (we are between here and #3 above)
- Create a black-and-white model of geopolitics: US vs everyone else. EU and Russia on the same team lol
- West fragments as US and EU relationship dwindle from pseudo-populist movements (e.g. MAGA)
- Pick specific countries in the EU to start alienating and repeat the cycle
- ???
- Profit in special economic zones
I would say that there’s cross-section of users from different instances whose community have different expectations regarding netiquette. .ml or .grad users posting about how they hate america or (insert country here) is fine in their instance, but is annoying/insulting for other instances users. (.ml and grad are just examples and not exclusive to them.) There is no evidence of governmental interference for many reasons ranging from: its not actually happening, to, no one is looking for it, to, its too hard to detect. Imho most people are influenced by the ziteguist of opinion. And a little embellishment here and there on Twitter, is enough to spread the “general knowledge” that the world is so bad and there’s nothing we can do. Even better, platforms promote this content to drive more engagement making the general opinion even worse.