- cross-posted to:
- genzedong
- cross-posted to:
- genzedong
To celebrate August 24 Vladimir Zelensky took to Instagram to upload a series of portraits of commanders born in post-Soviet Ukraine.
Unsurprisingly one serviceman’s image, alongside his full name and credentials, was pictured wearing a Nazi insignia of the 14th Waffen-SS Grenadier Division.
That unit of the SS recruited primarily Ukrainian collaborators, and has been accused of committing several massacres in Poland.
The SERPs really are not this personalised. Social media and youtube on the other hand very much is but the SERPs are not except in the case of searches where it recognises the need to optimise based on local geographical location. You are very much overstating this with regards to search engines.
Let me elaborate my distrusts towards search engines…
Now, let’s presume you use a self-hosted SE. Maybe, you are an ex-Google employee who worked on their SE for years and who wrote a new SE. Call me a paranoiac, but in the world somewhat dominated by big tech and industry companies, I presume it’s possible to keep ‘unwanted’ content further away from certain groups or individuals. I mean, your SE still tries to find the results in the existing global infrastructure — is it possible SEs are given not the full picture with intent?..
P.S. Writing this, I understood I don’t really know what’s going on under the hood along the way. However, it doesn’t really change my initial point (before tech ‘details’) that the person I wasn’t agree with only wants to see what he wants to see (not the first time, BTW), completely ignoring others’ points of view.
Yes there is plenty of reason to distrust search engines.
But to extrapolate that into what is essentially an argument you are making that google is putting more ukrainian nazis in front of my friend over there is nonsense. Google and other western tech companies are all nato-aligned businesses that know their interests lie with exploitation of global resources and expanding the western means to achieve that. They know that the war hurts them and they actively take part in suppressing negative news and information to the contrary while promoting western nato-aligned content in support of it.
The real bubbles lie on social media. My information bubble on twitter will be vastly different to yours, my search results probably won’t.
None of this however changes the fact that you’ll find nazis throughout the Ukrainian military at all levels. To put in perspective the HUGE extent of support for nazi ideology in Ukraine you only need to look at this 2014 poll of support for Stepan Bandera, leader of the OUN who carried out the nazi holocaust within Ukraine during ww2. 31% of the population supported Bandera when this poll was taken, while 48% was negative to him largely residing in the Luhansk, Crimea and Donetsk regions who went into secessionism or civil war shortly after this poll was taken. Even if we ignore the fact that these three regions make up the majority of Bandera haters you can still consider the following - If there’s a photo of 3 soldiers, one of them is a nazi that supports Stepan Bandera. The likelihood is at minimum 31% in the entire population. And this completely disregards the fact that the military attracts ultranationalists.
Debatable. But I’m too exhausted to discuss it ATM. If you want, you can hit me up later (in PM?).
Popular social media do create bubbles, indeed. However, the problem here is that some people just don’t use anything else: I’ve seen reports on how new generations use TikTok and Instagram as their SEs. We can conduct a little experiment on the latter just to be sure. I mean, if our SERPs would be similar or different.
I don’t say there are no neo-Nazis in Ukraine and its army. I’ve just stated there are neo-Nazi on both sides of this war conflict. If you want to appeal to such polls, I think you won’t be surprised there are weirder (and more grotesque) stuff going because of how some people are violent (un-empathetic) and other people are just being ignorant. I spoke with some Chinese about their government — imagine my surprise (oh, I was naïve) they were completely brainwashed while being completely ignorant about politics. I can imagine folks in Russia don’t even know what atrocities have happened during the 1920s and 1945+, 1960s… Ah, and the Lynch postcards in the US — I don’t think people even remember that.
This is just racism. You literally just called an entire population brainwashed when they are anything but.
Brainwashed on what exactly? In what way. You can’t say something so blatantly racist without expanding and justifying it.
Ehm, I didn’t?.. I said I spoke with a few Chinese folks — they were defending their government’s actions (repressive politics against disbelievers with all kinds of cyber-fascism, camps for Uyghurs, the whole Tibet, Taiwan, etc.) no matter what. When I started asking questions with if and that, they showed they don’t understand the topic whatsoever.
Probably that’s because it wasn’t racist.
That’s extremely vague. Please be more specific? I would like to know, specifically what you think they were ““brainwashed”” about. All you’ve done here is list a bunch of extremely vague topics. What about those topics?
I’ve listed the topics in the brackets. The only answer I’ve got from those people could be summarized to “my government surely does know what is it doing, I don’t know politics that much”. Yeah, I consider it brainwashed when people are blindly believe whatever is told. In the past, it was called religious faith. Which has nothing to do with critical thinking.
You have listed extremely vague topics, what specific things within those topics? Why do I need to repeat myself? I already asked you to be more specific. You are deliberately avoiding going into any more detail because you want people to fill in their own blanks and don’t want to say anything that might be questioned with actual evidence.
I just presume you aren’t going to defend China’s exploitation of other countries for the sake of resources (just like the US) or repressive manners of its state capitalism? Or will you?
Of course I am. Because that’s not what China does and you are consuming pure propaganda if that is what you believe. America’s empire is built upon exploitation through debt, China’s is not. Yes China uses loans, but if you have been led to believe that these loans are in any way remotely comparable to America’s then you have not actually looked into them in any way whatsoever.
How did you think randomly adding anti-chinese racism to a comment not about china would make any sense? WTF?