also note that most of those subs are the ones that fuckin full-on slurp up anything anti-china, and that most of them are anarchokiddie subs.
if anything this means we can’t leave reddit. we have to compete for hearts and minds, we can’t just make our own little club here and forget where the masses are. lemmy is cool for memes that got banned from reddit and stuff, but we can’t simply abandon the mainstream social media platforms.
posting is part of agitprop now, we can never stop posting. we will never stop posting.
I agree. As communists, it’s our duty to agitate where the masses are. This is great to use as a base to do so, and to have discussions, organize, etc, but we should never completely abandon those platforms.
What masses are on reddit?
Reddit is one of the 20 most popular sites in the world according to Alexa Rank.
yeah, a lot of commenters are petty borugeois, but a whole lot of people browse the site, so it’s important that we are there to disseminate our viewpoints and ideas.(mostly) white imperial core millennials and zoomers
VaushV and Breadtube of course doing more zenz posting.
I think this is a case for engagement in fact.
I mean it’s nice and good to have an off-site space like this where we don’t have to self-censor but if we just sit in our bubbles we’re not going to grow and like it or not we were using reddit to grow and it is on us to offer a counter-narrative rather than retreat to our own echo chambers to grumble amongst ourselves. I definitely think venting about this is good and its something I need too but ideally you interact with reddit and try and get people interested in the truth which you cannot do on a site like this that almost no one is going to stumble on organically unlike reddit. When we were venting on reddit other people would come in, most of the time they just called us names or spouted basic propaganda but sometimes there were curious people who wanted to hear our side. And that’s how you build resistance to the propaganda and the imperialism.
This is the correct take. The people who don’t fall over when the mildest propaganda breeze hits should be the last people to abandon reddit. As someone who got educated by the above poster and the other local CTH tankies and then saw the sub slowly become tankie favoured, I realized all the long wordy evidence-filled posts, the holding people’s feet to the fire mentality was working. I remembered a year ago, the place was rife with pro-HK propaganda and then a year later last month, shortly before it was banned, people were quite solidly against the HK protests.
Imagine if fatpollo, darkcalling and others just left the sub to the radlibs. I’d probably still be anti-PRC to this day, perhaps even more now since I wouldn’t be armed with the tools they granted me to resist the current propaganda.
literally post “china bad” on reddit and it’s instant karma these days
It’s a story from 2018 FFS!
While I’m not convinced Reddit is as astroturfed as some people think (Eglin air base notwithstanding), they are , in my opinion, trying to remove all sorts of political discourse and only have liberals left. Only pro-empire propaganda will be allowed down the line.
Also lol @ CA upvoting this.
The most addicted ‘city’ was Eglin airbase though and that was back in 2014
I seriously doubt US spooks have declined their use of astro turfing
Yeah, but at some point the masses will internalize your message and start doing your work for you. I believe this is what happens a lot
Everyone talks about how widely Reddit is astroturfed, but I’ve yet to find credible evidence of this – apart from Eglin of course, though that was in 2014 and programmes come and go.
Redditors believe what they read on Reddit and start repeating it. The whole site is a microcosm and if something becomes a meme (such as China Bad), they’ll start repeating it themselves without being prompted. I believe that this is what takes up the most volume on Reddit, propaganda outlets are a small part of it.
Well since 2014 the US legalised a law that previously prohibited domestic propaganda
Honestly the China stuff is likely a psyop by the Cia
Take the Ama by Rushan Abbas who partook in torture in Guantanamo (at the very least interrogating) and has worked with every arm of the US regime change (Radio free asia, state dept etc.)
Redditors believe what they read on Reddit and start repeating it. The whole site is a microcosm and if something becomes a meme (such as China Bad), they’ll start repeating it themselves without being prompted. I believe that this is what takes up the most volume on Reddit, propaganda outlets are a small part of it.
I think so too and this works for our side as well. The problem we run into is we don’t have the sheer numbers on our side (which means our posting, upvotes and downvotes need to be organized at some point to force visibility) and even in cases when we do have the numbers, the libs sniff out anything mildly left like a bloodhound and hold the power to outright silence us when we gain visibility.
It also doesn’t help that many leftists spend their time online not on debunking reactionaries but on “owning the tankies” and when they attempt to debunk they tend to do lib-appealing shit like qualify their position on said enemy nation (For e.g. I know said and said nation is bad but) before getting to the actual debunk.
I’ve been trying out different ways of getting the message out there and tbh in my experience only two things work:
- either you find someone who will be slightly receptive and you can have a one-on-one with them
- or you keep repeating the message enough in mainstream spaces.
I was partly radicalized because there was such a large amount of communists on r/shitamericanssay, and they motivated me to read Marx. I’ve also had some, limited, results with casting a net and reeling in one person who bites – start talking about marxist stuff on frontpage posts and if someone engages with you, you can try to
But mostly I think people start to believe what they hear often, even if it’s not true. Fox news uses this really well. It’s important to keep the fight going on Reddit, but it’s also not the end-all be-all of all organising, and it’s okay to take a break when libs start getting to you.
With that said I recently wrote a short article on r/cleanlivingkings, a toxic masculinity space for conservatives, and I think it’s entirely possible to deprogram these kids. Most of them are young, are just starting to experience the world anti-SJWs told them they would grow up into, and could be approached with empathy to help them out of this reactionary space.
That’s true, and I think you show class consciousness by saying that. It’s easy to fall into dichotomy and say “all these rightoids are fascists”, thinking we’re “in the right side”, but, look, we’ve all been wrong, we’ve all been there. There are many people who are now leftists but had this rightoid phase.
A way to control discourse is to reduce the (Overton) window of possible ideas being discussed but energetically incite engagement/debate within that space (Chomsky, I think.)
Its funny because Chomsky is an imperialist tool himself.
I think his work is very good as an entry level. Maybe that’s why he lasted so long in the public eye: he focus on “liberal” issues so at leasy people can look further into is more radical ideas.
Ridiculous how often I’m seeing Epoch Times articles and videos being spread around. Reminds me of unsuspecting ppl spreading Reason Magazine links.
I keep seeing people share bogus links on FB about all things China, and at this point, I’m pretty done removing people who don’t know how to be critical of media.
reddit has essentially made it site policy to ban any pro-China sub. the site helped me a lot in learning about ml, so it sucks to say it but the site is just a mouthpiece for US propaganda now
As a German lol
Oh yeah, as actual German I threw up a little about that. propaganda like that got us into two world wars.
It’s a shame that so many centrists have adopted the idea that if you disagree with them about china you’re automatically a bot. It shuts down any real conversation and furthers this kind of propaganda smh
tbh this is only natural after the liberals created the narrative that the only reason Trump won was bc of some bullshit “russian bots” instead of the very real contradictions present in american society and the hopelessness that the Obama administration gave people, when the first black president who spouted a “hope” and “change” rhetoric made no systemic changes to how the american state operates.
On the other side, if we don’t debunk that stuff, who does?
Question, what was the actual thing that happened?
I don’t have the receipts with me, but other communist spaces were suggesting it was just a normal 2018(?) prison transfer that has already gone viral before.
