this post was submitted on 20 May 2024
317 points (76.9% liked)
Political Memes
5054 readers
1813 users here now
Welcome to politcal memes!
These are our rules:
Be civil
Jokes are okay, but don’t intentionally harass or disturb any member of our community. Sexism, racism and bigotry are not allowed. Good faith argumentation only. No posts discouraging people to vote or shaming people for voting.
No misinformation
Don’t post any intentional misinformation. When asked by mods, provide sources for any claims you make.
Posts should be memes
Random pictures do not qualify as memes. Relevance to politics is required.
No bots, spam or self-promotion
Follow instance rules, ask for your bot to be allowed on this community.
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Midwest.social is the only whole instance that I suspect of being operated at least partly by shill / propaganda accounts. Maybe that's a weird outlandish accusation to make, but some of the admins are on the "no voting for Biden amirite" train which is unusual. And it's not the holistic "we are out of our gourds on all geopolitical issues" way that Hexbear users are. Midwest.social is like radical left people but a large part of the left radical criticism seems to be directed only at the Democrats. And, the whole "We are Midwest, we are from Ohio, look, it says [Ohio] right after my user name so you know I'm from the Midwest" thing is weird. There are plenty of regional servers but none of them give me the same "yo wtf is up with that" vibe like midwest.social does.
IDK. Maybe that sounds uncompelling, like an extraordinary claim with very sketchy evidence. But I looked around it a bit and it seemed just sort of off in a way that's hard now for me to articulate beyond saying that it seemed weird.
I don't think it's outlandish; that's exactly what I've noticed from every single post coming from the instance or it's users and why it feels like Hexbear. Just constant, obnoxious hot takes about throwing away their vote because "both sides bad" instead of constant obnoxious hot takes about communist countries.
I joined it because "Midwest". To be frank though. Local posts are in the 10s a day. I never see them unless i select local only. I've seen a fair bit more left position represented than would seem representative of the Midwest. Not that it's a bad thing. There is an instance pinned post about the administration standing with the protesters. Which again isn't specifically a bad thing. (I'll look at the discourse inside later) I see screechy hyperbolic posts about "genocide Joe" getting generally down voted. So I can't make any real comments about any strong vibe. But no. Not all of us are coping with severe head trauma like archcomrade.
I think it's safe to say he may just be loud, obnoxious, and perceived as being more representative than they are. Due to how inactive the rest of us seem to be.
There are dozens of us!
I would say my experience on midwest.social aligns with Lemmy's population as a whole - generally left of (US) center, with a few further left folks. Most of the content is either midwest-specific news or LOTR memes, probably makes sense that the only content that gets widely upvoted by Lemmy at large is the left-leaning memes.
I haven't seen anything nearly as extreme as the posts/comments from hexbear/grad/ml, but I wouldn't be surprised if users from those instances have accounts on multiple instances to push propaganda.