I notice that often (not always) inflammatory comments are written by those who frequent politics related communities.
In addition to being straight up antagonistic, the comments often are about labeling and categorizing everything. Like if someone posted a meme or made a joke. It can’t just simply be taken at face value. The commenter is compelled to categorize it, label it, assume there is an underlying agenda. It has to be Russian or Chinese propaganda, it’s far-left or far right, its LGBTQ related, it’s incel related, it’s promoting some agenda somehow.
When I go to check their profile it is very common that the individual frequently comments in politics related communities.
Man, not everything on the planet needs to be politics related. There’s not a deep state agenda for everything. Memes and jokes are sometimes dumb and silly and no one is trying to promote anything. There is actually a type of humor called Surreal humor or Absurdist humor which like sarcasm seems like a lot of people just don’t get.
Politics really rots people’s brains.
Same, communism would be a great way to go about things if people weren’t involved but they are and the ones that rise to power often absolutely fucking suck.
I don’t see much in the way of obvious pro-CCP and pro-Putin propaganda around here though, I see way more posts calling it out. Maybe my instance has blocked the worst offenders, I don’t know.
Lemmy.world is defederated from Hexbear and Lemmygrad, which are the two most cited tankie instances. Several other instances are defederated from them as well, though I don’t know them all off the top of my head.
There are other instances which remain federated with them, however, and so they may see more posts from those instances as well as potentially dramatically different comment sections with Hexbear/Lemmygrad users who are otherwise invisible to those from instances that defederated from them.
Ah, makes sense. Thanks!
It’s not obvious, they know subtlety is required, and the core of most propaganda is truthful.
Something to look for is content that divides the enemies of the Kremlin/CCP (often the same). Digital divide and conquer, fueled by paid shills and LLMs.
Some examples are:
They also more directly attack political opponents. They can’t constantly say “Putin is great,” it’s too obvious. But they attack people.
Biden is an obvious example because they want their asset Trump to win, and an interesting example because they’re also focusing on Israel and BLM as wedge issues against Biden… the Kremlin really wants Trump to win so they can steal land and control people in eastern Ukraine.