Israel, STOP KILLING CIVILIANS!!
Israel is the aggressor
Is it just me or is this community heavily biased? I wonder if this pro-Hamas stance is really present on Lemmy or if there's some bot activity going on.
If you look outside the US or European MSM, you'll find the world is repulsed by Israel's mass murder of civilians.
Being against blowing up innocent people in their homes is about as far from "pro hamas" as you can be.
Lemmy is mostly lefties despite a few glaring counter examples.
Theres a lot of huffing gas going on on the left with near zero historical context or on-the-ground understanding. People still repeat "River t0 the Sea" as if it's not a literal call to genocide for militant nationalists. Instead they post the decolonization blog. Meanwhile even Palestinian Authority reps and members of the negotiating team for the last n peace deals are publishing opinion pieces that the phrase is intrinsically a call to violent genocide and the Palestinian supporters really need to check who they are getting their "facts" from. It's basically on siding with a terrorist org but because some people think there is a noble goal beneath it that makes it OK to chant.
There's also a lot of people too young to remember how the West and East conducts sieges in dense urban areas. It's not good or pretty to look at.
Also like most people outside of the region don't seem to get that Palestinians and Israelis are both more or less the same ethnicity (Semitic though the term has fallen out of usage outside of describing the language roots of Arab and Hebrew and like half a dozen other languages) and look the same. There isn't a skin color component. That's projection from Americans/Westerners who mostly see Ashkenazi jews who tend to avoid light for various reasons and are pretty pale. Once they are back in the middle east everyone turns a shade of olive/brown and you couldn't pick a jew or an Arab out of a lineup if they didn't have religious clothing on to make it easier.
It's more like people especially from the Germanic and English world get surprised that not everyone is rooting for Palestine to get wiped off the map.
Maybe it would be better if they were getting paid. I'm pretty sure the sad truth is they are spreading all this propaganda because they genuinely believe it.
Am I the only one seeing this? Is it... normal for 3 comments in a row to have exactly balanced numbers of up and down votes?
That's a very strange coincidence.
Votes are public and there's no fuzzing like on Reddit, so shenanigans are pretty unlikely.
I run my own instance so I'm always a little paranoid that I fucked it up somehow. Or like, maybe theres a known bug that I don't know about, or a compatibility issue between versions/platforms.
But as another commenter mentioned, at worse it's some loser botting but more likely it really was just a coincidence.
Shenanigans are actually super easy if you care.
Can you elaborate?
You can log into like 5 accounts and basically put anything you want to the top of any comment chain given how low the total vote numbers on lemmy tend to be. An actual astroturfing group could curate the entire front page for pennies.
Sure, but again, it's all public record, so the patterns become pretty easy to spot when you see brand new accounts vote-brigading, or always the same 5 alts that are doing it.
For example: https://kbin.social/m/kbinMeta/t/134579/Call-out-post-for-a-particular-karma-farmer-on-kbin-social
It's public record but it doesn't take much effort to obfuscate it's happening. That's why reddit fuzzed votes in the first place.
Chatgpt makes it really easy for the people inclined to write scripts to post comments and repost articles and spin up dozens or hundreds of accounts.
Captchas help but someone committed can throw $100 in and get many many accounts if they don't want to do it themselves. IPv6 addresses to proxy the bots through are easy to get by the thousand too.
You also don't use brand new accounts you roll them over the course of a few weeks or months.
And if you don't want to actually DO any of that work you can just hire a service that already has the accounts to do it for you.
You can log into like 5 accounts and basically put anything you want to the top of and comment chain given how low the total vote numbers on lemmy tend to be. An actual astroturfing group could curate the entire front page for pennies.
The other commenter got to it already.
Probably vote brigading by toxic hexbear users' alts or some other tankies.
It's also a pretty divided topic, especially with the fact that the nature of the conflict leads some people to abandon logic for emotional reasoning. Emotional reasoning makes people feel more sure of themselves and justified in their beliefs and actions.
Are the hexbears hiding under your bed or something?
Nope. They're too busy circle-jerking each other while they vote brigade and spread propoganda.
It's tokenboomer, expect highjinks
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