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

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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

  • soronixa
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    73 years ago

    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.

    • @TheAnonymouseJokerOP
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      23 years ago

      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

  • @TheAnonymouseJokerOP
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    3 years ago

    (2/2) Lemmy needs to increase limit like Reddit has 15k character limit

    !LiberalNews echo chamber created

    soferman came here to create a political rift inside Lemmy community, most excellently demonstrated by one of my POSTS screenshots that show magically how many communities they were moderating in the span of one month of account creation. Gaining credibility in nefarious ways so nobody can question your authority. How convenient.

    soferman cries about how they were targeted, all the while targeting other posters and admins since a month

    All this while, and nobody thought anybody would write this long piece. Have fun.

    This should serve as a playbook for admins and other users to notice any such person coming here again on Lemmy, or any internet forum in the future.

    I do not want to tell how much pain and effort it took to document this, compress the screenshots using jpegoptim, upload and type all this on phone, wait for uploading one pic every 6 minutes … and typing all this in 4 hours. T_T

    • Sightline
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      23 years ago

      Ok so I finally got around to reading this.

      The websites are all pro imperialist news outlets with an inherent geopolitical bias

      I don’t think you can get away from that, the only solution I can think of is to force the poster to post facts, or to break up /c/worldnews into subcategories. The burden of proof would be upon the poster, no fallacies allowed, etc…

      I am unsure when creating a partisan political divide between a community was an allowed thing on any forum on the internet.

      This is going to happen no matter what, I thought it’d be from the “alt-right” first (or shills pretending to be alt-right). The only real problem I see is that @soferman@lemmy.ml was using the wrong community to post.

      […] 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.

      Ok yeah fact based is the only answer. If it can’t be proven without a reasonable doubt then maybe it shouldn’t be posted.

      • X happened, here is bona-fide proof.
      • X claimed Y, here is their statement.

      The truth is obviously out there, it just depends on if the poster is arguing in good-faith or not.

      • @TheAnonymouseJokerOP
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        3 years ago

        It is important that anyone with dishonest intent or disrespect for neutral discussion ethics be called out immediately and relentlessly. Of course, this requires a very proactive audience, a lot of which indeed exists on Lemmy.

        It is also important that people retain or learn critical thinking instead of relying on others to dictate X good Y bad, and to notice and callout the bad fish trying to divide community.

        I am honestly surprised I had to put in so much effort to stop this nonsense, and I was the only one doing it. Perhaps some people were afraid of standing out as reactionaries, or losing their composure in the heat of the moment, or being unable to word their arguments tirelessly and so on. I can only be glad the community could stand for itself atleast, when I backed everyone up.

        I can tell from the downvote patterns and the shades thrown at me, that I have gained a number of silent enemies here. I do not mind the fan club, as I already had a fair amount of them before. I only care about people and the community getting better, and thus a better society, even if I need to put myself in front of the guns.

        • Sightline
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          3 years ago

          Honestly that’s a lot of words that don’t say much. Truth is all that matters, if Vice News is linking “the truth” then I don’t see a problem. (eg: they reasonably prove their assertion or claim), if China is speaking truth then I don’t care either. I don’t care if the news is “pro-imperialist” or “pro-Communist” as long as it provides the truth. If an entity doesn’t know the full “truth” then it should say so, kinda like how the US is doing with the UAP’s/UFO’s. They aren’t confirming these objects are aliens, but they aren’t denying it either as they don’t have proof that said objects are 100% from outer-space.

          Anyways, once again banning @soferman@lemmy.ml was maybe a bit much, tell him to use the correct community and if he doesn’t then ban him.

          “I can tell from the downvote patterns and the shades thrown at me, that I have gained a number of silent enemies here.”

          Just speak facts. China hates facts, the US hates facts, Reddit really hates facts (especially /r/conspiracy as I was just banned from there). Bona-fide facts are the common ground. (And I don’t mean Trumpism facts either). It should be obvious as to what I’m trying to say, and it’ll be obvious if you try to fight against it. I will do everything I can to back you up if you’re speaking the truth, and others who want to advance the human race will do the same.

          Sorry it took so long for me to reply, I get easily caught up in other things. Also I’m a bit tired so my grammar may be shit right now.

          • @TheAnonymouseJokerOP
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            3 years ago

            I always stick to facts. It is indeed imperative that we do, instead of pushing some nationalist or cultist agenda of some entity. The thing is, these Trumpist or even corrupt liberals (demonstrably here) create their echo chambers and label others with stupid epithets without engaging, and try to handwave when they lose arguments.

            Reddit is an extremely corrupt place in general to discuss issues, with 50% USA and 30% West EU audiences with an obvious imperialist bias. r/conspiracy, if you did not notice, became a den for Trump fans around 2017, most likely with the Reddit Tencent 5% stuff and when TD got quarantined. Participating there is a waste of time.

            The thing is, soferman admitted this here (https://lemmy.ml/post/70181), a thing I have been screaming for so long here:

            I’ll actively work against Lemmy and it’s developers and there isn’t much projects or organizations that are going to want to associate with Lemmy either.

            A person like this can never be beneficial to any platform, especially a fediverse one, when their main goal in the first place was to create a political divide and an echo chamber. A person, that calls others tankie scum, authoritarian defenders, calls Lemmy a 99% tankies platform, and uses a lot of ableist phrasing, that is not reasonable in any way.

            • Sightline
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              3 years ago

              I’ll actively work against Lemmy and it’s developers and there isn’t much projects or organizations that are going to want to associate with Lemmy either.

              I think he deleted his original post, but if he really did say that then yeah he’s a problem.

              The thing is, these Trumpist or even corrupt liberals (demonstrably here) create their echo chambers and label others with stupid epithets without engaging, and try to handwave when they lose arguments.

              A person like this can never be beneficial to any platform

              We’re on the same page, I agree.

              r/conspiracy, if you did not notice, became a den for Trump fans around 2017

              Oh I for sure noticed, check this out if you have time: https://www.reddit.com/r/SubredditDrama/comments/o0nc99/once_a_place_to_discuss_aliens_and_pyramids

              4chan.org/pol also became the same way around 2016 or so. They use to be semi-rational (relative to now). My theory is the shills turned both /r/conspiracy and /pol/ into wastelands.

              • @TheAnonymouseJokerOP
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                13 years ago

                They removed their Lemmy profile just 4 hours ago, looking at the edits they made. They were a disgusting person, to try and sabotage this Fediverse project. I will continue to stand against such elements. Take this as a threat, lurkers. I will make some fruit squash out of you virtual monsters.

                Thanks for sharing that, I will read it. I am not the kind of person to get into drama usually though :p but you seem a lot more composed person to me.

                You might like reading my thoughts on internet communities I wrote at the end of 2020 https://teddit.net/r/privatelife/comments/k7vngo/2020_special_the_good_the_bad_and_the_ugly_my/

                • Sightline
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                  3 years ago

                  Hey I saw your message yesterday and I plan on reading the link you shared, but this video from NowThisNews basically just said what we said. About 4 minutes in he talks about how “things changed” in 2015-2016 in regards to conspiracy theories and online culture.