Has anyone else noticed how prevalent Hexbear posters have suddenly become? Maybe sometime last week I noticed nearly every political post had at least one long thread of Hexbear users that do nothing but repeat CCP talking points while waving anyway anything even remotely reliable as Western propaganda. That or getting all excited about trolled libs. The way they tell it, you'd think everything from DW, to Fox, to Propublica, to straight up AP News articles, are all written by the same people.
Not to mention, their info on the Fediverse observer is either straight up wrong or there's some serious botting going on. According to that, the instance is less than a month old, yet somehow they already have one of the largest, most active userbases, along with far and away the most comments of any instance.
Seems to me like Lemmygrad on steroids. Considering we defederated from them, seems like a no-brainer to block Hexbear as well.
So glad this thread could become such a perfect microcosm of why we need to defederate.
Just curious, are you old enough to remember the media role in the run up to the Iraq War? The US media spread outright lies on behalf of the military industrial complex, to a degree that made it obvious to anyone watching once things started to go south after the war was well underway. It may not be quite as obvious these days as it was back then, but that kind of media manipulation is still very common. These days, you also have direct social media manipulation on top of that. In my opinion, it’s a terrible idea to accept the media narrative at face value, and you should at least consider other arguments and try to dig into the evidence a little more yourself instead of just saying someone is a shill. I think you’ll start finding the reality might be different than what you were initially led to believe.
Also on the topic of media manipulation, here is a GREAT video that everyone imo should watch: https://youtube.com/watch?v=2BO83Ig-E8E
It was absolutely not obvious at all to Americans back then. Or more accurately, they wanted to believe the lies so they did
73% of Americans were in favor of invading Iraq
Some of us saw right through that shit immediately though
Not sure if I made it clear enough, but I meant it became more obvious once the war started going badly and the weapons of mass destruction had not turned up.
Same thing happened in Vietnam. In fact, public opinion only really changed after the politicians started saying that it was 'time to scale down US involvement' or whatever, which only came years after many people in the Whitehouse realised the war was unwinnable. In the meantime, and despite all the famous protests and anti-war marches, the public was pretty happy to follow the official line that America was the good guy and that communism had to be stopped.
You could do an interesting analysis of this phenomenon using Gramsci's idea of Cultural Hegemony as a framing device.
Yep, I also feel like many people have inserted their own reality of history where all the anti war protests and fraggings were because the Americans wanted to stop killing others
But if you actually read the sentiment from people back then, the seemingly strongest sentiment was to stop the war because too many Americans were coming back in body bags and American soldiers were heavily demoralized from the nightmarish conditions of guerilla warfare against the Vietnamese
They just didn't want more Americans to die for a reason they've never been told about
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nayirah_testimony
Thanks for posting this. This is another great case that illustrates how western media manipulation happens.