I want to draw attention to the elephant in the room.
Leading up to the election, and perhaps even more prominently now, weâve been seeing droves of people on the internet displaying a series of traits in common.
- Claiming to be leftists
- Dedicating most of their posting to dismantling any power possessed by the left
- Encouraging leftists not to vote or to vote for third party candidates
- Highlighting issues with the Democratic party as being disqualifying while ignoring the objectively worse positions held by the Republican party
- Attacking anyone who promotes defending leftist political power by claiming they are centrists and that the attacker is âto the left of themâ
- Using US foreign policy as a moral cudgel to disempower any attempt at legitimate engagement with the US political system
- Seemingly doing nothing to actually mount resistance against authoritarianism
When you look at an aerial view of these behaviors in conjunction with one another, what theyâre accomplishing is pretty plain to see, in my opinion. Itâs a way of utilizing the moral scrupulousness of the left to cut our teeth out politically. We get so caught up in giving these arguments the benefit of the doubt and of making sure people who claim to be leftists have a platform that weâre missing ideological parasites in our midst.
This is not a good-faith discourse. This is not friendly disagreement. This is, largely, not even internal disagreement. It is infiltration, and itâs extremely effective.
Before attacking this argument as lacking proof, just do a little thought experiment with me. If there is a vector that allows authoritarians to dismantle all progress made by the left, to demotivate us and to detract from our ability to form coalitions and build solidarity, do you really think they wouldnât take advantage of it?
By refusing to ever question those who do nothing with their time in our spaces but try to drive a wedge between us, to take away our power and make us feel helpless and hopeless, weâre giving them exactly that vector. I am telling you, they are using it.
We need to stop letting them. We need to see it for what it is, get the word out, and remember, as the political left, how to use the tools that we have to change society. It starts with us between one another. It starts with what we do in the spaces that we inhabit. They know this, and itâs why theyâre targeting us here.
Stop being an easy target. Stop feeding the cuckoo.
These are contradictory statements.
I wonât identify anyone who is claimed to be an example, specifically because of the valid concern raised in the second quote. I will say that the two examples that come most clearly to mind for the proof requested in the first quote are two people who are in that category of âtalks CONSTANTLY about how voting for Democrats would be a terrible thing that no self-respecting leftist would EVER do for any reasonâ, who also claimed to be American, who also made mistakes that no American would make. One of them used non-American characters to punctuate a number, and then when it was pointed out they got confused and didnât understand what people were pointing out that was weird about their number. Another claimed that they employed a bunch of people and paid them all $250k per year (and, again, seemed not to understand that this was a wild thing to claim when people pointed it out ).
Is that proof positive that those people are working for the Russians? No, not really. Is it âbeyond a reasonable doubtâ that they are working for someone? Yes, to me. Certainly in conjunction with all the other circumstantial evidence about the way they behave. You use the standard straw man of âanyone who disagrees with youâ being put in this category, but that is not at all whatâs happening here. I disagree with people on Lemmy constantly and I very rarely think that this is whatâs going on. However when I run into a very particular confluence of factors and ways of behaving, I start to think that the person might be a paid propaganda account.
But regardless of that, talking about the problem in general is surely okay. Your implicit threat to have the mods shut us all down is a waste of time. Talk to the mods (I am sure that some people have), tell them about the post, let them do what theyâre doing to do. This is 100% an active and important problem on the Fediverse and talking about it is no kind of bad faith. I do actually, halfway, agree that singling out any particular user to accuse, could be a problem even if youâre extremely sure. But thatâs not what this is.
This is you directly asserting that people in this post are part of OPâs supposed group. This is and clearly never was just talking about the problem in the abstract.
I was not calling for OP to call people out, I was pointing out that their choosing not to do so meant that there was no way to repudiate the assertions. If someone who fits your supposed âpatternâ proves theyâre not in fact a bot/ troll/ AI/ etc, you can just claim they clearly werenât who you were talking about. Itâs a set up for a No True Scotsman argument.
Which is all well and good to claim, except that both OP and you clearly think some of those people are in this thread, based on your own comments, and many of the people disagreeing with OP here, I havenât seen around much on BH, and none of their comments in here are doing the behaviors OP describes. That doesnât look to me like âa very particular confluence of factors and ways of behavingâ, it looks like youâre absolutely just using this as a broad net to attack people who disagree with you.
Sure it is. âThere are people in these comments who are in the grouping Iâm talking aboutâ is quite similar to âthere are people on Lemmy who are in the grouping Iâm talking about.â In both cases, weâre talking about the problem without starting an unproductive and maybe-totally-wrong accusation against any single specific person.
Again, I donât really want to single out any specific person, since thereâs no way to be completely sure and thereâs so much overlap between someone who is doing propaganda and simply someone who is arguing in bad faith. And whatâs the point of starting the big argument that will surely ensue. I will say, though, that there is someone in these comments who I replied to who is exhibiting some of the behaviors OP described pretty much to a T.
Look through my history. How many times (for whatever timeframe you have time and inclination for) have I disagreed with someone, and how many of those times have I chosen to âattackâ them in this way?
I actually agree with some of the people who I believe are these accounts, on some things. They tend to be stridently pro-Palestinian for example, which I think is a way to give themselves cover. Actually one of the tells of those accounts is that they will sometimes accuse others of not being pro-Palestinian, and being rabidly pro-Israel, which as far as I can tell no one on Lemmy is. There are specific useful reasons why I think they are making that accusation, but if I were just doing this as a way of disagreeing with people, why would I take some person who is making a pro-Palestinian point which I completely agree with, and decide that they are a propaganda account just so I can âattackâ the viewpoint I agree with? That doesnât make any sense. Thatâs an example of what Iâm talking about with âways of behavingâ that are separate from the viewpoint, without needing to accuse any specific person to explain myself.
I canât make you agree with OP, and of course you are not required to. But you seem to be extremely persistent, here, in interpreting something OP is saying which has some widespread agreement as obviously that they are saying some other, different thing.
So now youâve shifted from âyou got them riled upâ, to âthereâs one specific person in these commentsâ. Thank you for proving my point about moving targets.
And before you try to claim you were using âthemâ in the singular, your next comment was âThey all speak sort of similarly to each other, too.â.
âThere are people in this room who are badâ is quite similar to âthere are people in this countryâŠâ
This is a red herring. OP is calling for people to exclude and block in order to box out political disagreements from being visible, not respond with attacking comments. I canât see your blocklist, so I canât see who you are âattackingâ in this way.
Youâve run this line with me before, and against others (including in this thread). What exactly that OP said did I misrepresent?
âŠ
Surely you can see there is not a contradiction between âthere are elephants in this roomâ and âletâs talk about one specific elephant in this roomâ?
Dude, thatâs how I see it. Sorry if that upsets you. Not sure what else I can say about it.
Iâm not OP. I actually donât think blocking them is a good idea. I think disagreeing with them in a particular way, and talking about the problem in general to spread awareness, is the right answer.
As I keep repeating, the politics or the substance of the disagreement has nothing to do with it. Itâs to do with a particular argumentation style.
I actually think you could make certain rules for communities that had nothing to do with calling out propaganda accounts, that would do quite a lot to address this problem, simply because the accounts Iâm thinking of depend so heavily on certain types of bad-faith behaviors that are problems regardless of whoâs doing them or why.
Would it make you more comfortable if I made a separate post calling out particular types of behavior that I think are a real problem, and then we could talk about that without needing to accuse anyone of doing it because they are propaganda? I can do that. That actually might be a better way to go, because there are surely non-propaganda accounts which would be in that category which we should be addressing, and then there is no risk of someone being âcaught up in the netâ so to speak when they are genuinely not doing propaganda.
You said, more or less, that the issue is boxing out particular viewpoints. OP is clearly talking about behaviors and motivations (murky as that second one is to intuit), which is different. Thatâs the core of the misrepresentation.
The problem is that all of these work together. Youâre in OPâs post, agreeing with OP, making assertions that you see these âbehaviorsâ, while never once previously disagreeing with OPâs remedy. Severing out of a key aspect of their post, in one comment, at the bottom of a long comment chain, while only expressing agreement elsewhere? I think itâs fair for me to say you are boosting OPâs position.
Yes, that would have been a good route, rather than just agreeing with OP and talking evasively about fellow commenters being bad.
No, OP is most definitely attacking specific positions, not just behaviors. Hereâs a position-agnostic version of their list:
These are generic behaviors that would make the post not specifically about a particular group of people that OP has an issue with.
The dead giveaway is the one I bolded, because OPâs version is specifying the Party itself, not simply the Left end of the political spectrum.
âHighlighting issues with Socialism as being disqualifying while ignoring the objectively worse positions held by the Democratic partyâ, for example, would run afoul of my âbehavior-onlyâ, version, but not OPâs position-specific version, so the only logical conclusion (which the rest of their comments definitely support) is that OP would in fact not have an issue with the behavior in that instance.
I think @Thevenin has the right of this issue in both of their comments: https://beehaw.org/comment/4660421
Side note: after our âdiscussionâ a few weeks back, I went and read some of the interviews David Hogg has given since his Vice Chair win, and Iâm pretty excited for how heâs talking about changing the DNC!
Iâm glad I went back through this post and found this, because this part:
Is exactly what happened to me with this user, right up until yesterday. He kept asserting something I disagreed with, to which I responded in detail, and then theyâd explicitly say âi agree 100% why are you so upset?â, while reiterating nearly the same point but with some pretty important distinctions. It went back and forth for far longer than I care to admit, and then when I finally put a fine-enough point on it they disengaged with âarenât I allowed to disagree?â as if he hadnât been repeatedly expressing nothing but agreement.
Itâs been a while since I got baited like that, but if there were a agnostic behavior online I thought needed to be banned, itâd be this one exactly.
Unbelievably enraging, but also a bit insidious because to the outside observer it looks like they actually are in agreement, and then they go on to completely rewrite the perspective to match theirs as if itâs the no-brainer position (see? look, weâre agreeing). It is some absurd postmodern contemporary version of MLKâs white moderate.
Yes, they also of course ignored all my actual arguments in their response. Literally made a whole thing about how OP was not about positions just behaviors, I lay out how it very much was about positions, and the next response completely ignores that and pivots to something else entirely.
Itâs almost impressive how much near-sealioning they did.
Whatâs your reaction to these parts?:
I will say that the two examples that come most clearly to mind for the proof requested in the first quote are two people who are in that category of âtalks CONSTANTLY about how voting for Democrats would be a terrible thing that no self-respecting leftist would EVER do for any reasonâ, who also claimed to be American, who also made mistakes that no American would make. One of them used non-American characters to punctuate a number, and then when it was pointed out they got confused and didnât understand what people were pointing out that was weird about their number. Another claimed that they employed a bunch of people and paid them all $250k per year (and, again, seemed not to understand that this was a wild thing to claim when people pointed it out).
Actually one of the tells of those accounts is that they will sometimes accuse others of not being pro-Palestinian, and being rabidly pro-Israel, which as far as I can tell no one on Lemmy is. There are specific useful reasons why I think they are making that accusation, but if I were just doing this as a way of disagreeing with people, why would I take some person who is making a pro-Palestinian point which I completely agree with, and decide that they are a propaganda account just so I can âattackâ the viewpoint I agree with?
My take on a lot of this is that these sound like the strawmen positions that Iâve had levied against me before.
As in, especially during the last election cycle, I had people on BH who have no clue who I am (or that I would and did vote for Harris), trying to chastise me or accuse me of being a troll for âtalk[ing] CONSTANTLY about how voting for Democrats would be a terrible thing that no self-respecting leftist would EVER do for any reasonâ, when in fact I was talking about Democratsâ failures in order to try to fix them.
The Democratic Party is at a huge crossroads right now, because itâs lost 2 elections to Trump that shouldnât have even been close, and in both cases it was with candidates who either 1) had no primary to choose them, or 2) were in control of the Party during the primary. The fact that 2024 happened, and weâre still seeing these takes attacking Leftists (just calling them âfakeâ doesnât make it so, no matter how much OP wishes it did), instead of saying, âhey, maybe the Centrist path of trying to work across the aisle doesnât actually work to counter the alt-Right/ Trump-Right/ whatever you want to name their current brand of bad-faith political gamesmanshipâ, is breaking my brain.
We need to be discussing any and every viable path to fixing the party, not calling people who say the current incarnation of the party canât win âdoomersâ or trolls, when many of our point is that we can win, if we fix the party.
Youâre speaking in generalities, and I have no way to judge what happened or was likely the situation, from this statement. You could be describing a random Cyrillic character that wouldnât be on a non-Russian keyboard, for instance, or you could be describing someone using a comma for denoting decimal places, which is something a British or Canadian would do, even if theyâre living in the US. Iâm not going to denounce someone sight-unseen based on what you wrote.
I work in infosec, and attribution is difficult under the best of circumstances. If I had IP logs, request headers, UserAgent strings, etc, I might be able to spot a foreign national impersonating an American, but I donât, and neither do you.
Iâve seen at least 2 accounts on Beehaw, pre-election, who were rabidly pro-Israel. One of them disappeared completely after the election. The other I still see around, still often posting pro-Israel and Israel-apologist content and comments. So in my experience, your âtellâ is flawed by being based on a false premise. And thatâs just Beehaw. Across all of Lemmy, including the center-right instances? There are absolutely staunch Zionists and pro-Israel users.
Well, since youâre asking me to surmise âwhyâ you might do that, my dime-store-psychology take would be that youâve probably been influenced by the large amount of propaganda takes both pre- and post-election, that keep insisting that the pro-Palestine movement online was being driven artificially in order to divide the Democratic Party (as opposed to actually being a signal that Israel was in fact no longer considered âgoodâ among Dem voters).
After we lost, many pro-Israel sources (even in congress) have rushed to blame the pro-Palestinian movement for it, because it allows them to both set up the pro-Palestinian movement as an enemy to the party, and to deflect blame from Bidenâs pro-Israel stances for contributing to the loss, both of which serve their interests.
Youâve had people accuse you of having no idea what normal American salaries are or how Americans write their numbers, while claiming to be a genuine American who was super-concerned about the election, and saying that was suspicious? What strawman position similar to that have you had levied against you?
Most of the people OP was talking about are not trying to fix the Democrats, and theyâre often pretty explicit about saying that Democrats are as bad or worse than the Republicans and that they want to not vote or vote for third party candidates as a result. Obviously, advocating for a third party in itself isnât suspicious or anything, itâs fine, but the particular type of guaranteed-to-be-counterproductive way that theyâre doing it is what OP is calling out, I think.
I sort of get what youâre saying, that maybe someone has accused you of being a fake account because you criticize Democrats, and thatâs how you read OPâs message. I donât think that is what OPâs talking about, itâs certainly not what I am talking about.
I⊠what?
This has nothing to do with my question. I was pointing out that some of these fake accounts put on pro-Palestinian affects, and that I still think they are suspicious even though I am also pro-Palestinian. It doesnât even need to be anything to do with the Democrats in this scenario. I feel like you read what I talked about but now youâre talking about some totally different scenario.
I am aware that thereâs a whole establishment-Democrat theory that the pro-Palestinian movement itself was âfakeâ or not really valid. Thatâs 100% different from what I am talking about, and I donât think that theory ever really got traction with anyone outside of DC or the establishment media. Actually I would specifically contrast something like the âuncommittedâ movement as an excellent example of something that is clearly real, because it clearly shows concern for the Palestinian people and a desire to fight for a better solution, whereas the exact thing me and OP have been talking about and what makes it suspicious is people who seem like theyâre totally unconcerned with making things any better, and just want to explicitly tell people never to vote for Democrats, and thatâs the end of it and as far as it goes. Which, votingâs not enough sure, but refusing to do it at all seems totally counterproductive to anything good happening with immigration or Palestine. Totally different from what youâre talking about as your own behavior and advocacy.
Did that all not come through from what either of us said so far? You thought we were just saying that anyone who criticizes Democrats must be fake?