I ain't young, but this is my first election where I am a real lefty, and... Has it always been this bad?
The liberal seething is just disgusting right now. You can't be on any place of the internet that has any discussion about politics whatsoever.
If you suggest that the Democrats should be better, then you get called out for trying to make Trump president
If you respond that now is the time to actually put pressure on candidates because they're running for office and in any fucking reasonable place, this is where they would make campaign promises and you can demand stuff out of them, then they say that you're being a fascist.
The liberal propaganda is just mind numbing.
Even the traditionally leftist places on Reddit (a place I visit very infrequently, so small changes add up over time when I visit and see the crazies have come out of the woodworks) are getting inundated with a bunch of "but the GOP is worse", and "we have to compromise" and blah blah blah. Even in some commie spaces.
Like I understand not being a doomer, and trying to actually make things better in the meantime while we build forces for the revolution, but holy shit, it's like Anyone to the right of Marxist Leninists have immediately caved to pressure.
I am convinced that shit is hella astroturfed. Don't get me wrong, there are a lot of Democrat fanatics out there, but i highly suspect that they also have huge bot farms that get activated at times like this. It was the same with the whole NAFO psyop when the Ukraine conflict kicked off, yes there were some mentally unstable individuals and genuine fascists in that, but a ton of it we later found out was co-ordinated and botted almost to Zionist hasbara levels. The intelligence agencies are deep in this sort of stuff.
Point is, the image that you get of the political mood in society if you just look at online social media is deliberately and heavily manipulated.
At this point it's painfully obvious that it's a lot of bots seeding the comments and then libs regurgitating all the same talking points. Reddit has basically become this sort of entity where you just need a few bots to get the ball rolling and then everyone falls into line. Which is hilariously on display when you see everyone calling every other subreddit an echo chamber, or when you see how common certain phrases show up on reddit. "unhinged", "mental gymnastics", and other rhetoric that tried to dehumanize the other party/group/individual basically in any exchange. I recently noticed this since Hexbear and Lemmygrad has it's own lingo of sorts and it doesn't fall in line with reddit's lol.
I still need to read Manufacturing Consent, but this became glaringly obvious to me after reading Inventing Reality. I think this is what sets ours Lemmy instances apart from other social media in a lot of ways. It cracked me up earlier today on a reddit post about how it turns out China is basically taking over in the technological innovation department since the US is too busy feeding the war machine, and it was just comment after comment saying how China stole everything and don't care about patent laws(lol...). It was just like 400 of the same fucking comment man, and like one guy saying he moved to China last year and it's a lot nicer than the States. This post coming the same week as the US churning out 25 new laws aimed against China and shoving something like $30 billion into the anti-China propaganda machine. Not suspicious...
I started noticing it more via twitter after the October 7th thing happened and all the zionists coming out of the woodwork there, who would use the same general talking points, be accounts who were inorganic in their origins, posting history, username, etc.
And I agree, it seems heavily a part of reddit as well; it's just harder to spot at a glance on reddit because the accounts are more anonymized, as is the voting. But the tonality of it (for lack of a better word) is distinctly there. Although it's certainly believable, like you say, that there are fanatics out there, the numbers don't make sense. Many regular people are plain busy and do not have the time to be posting foaming at the mouth imperialism on the internet, even if they wanted to; and if they did, they would articulate it in varied ways based on their levels of ignorance regarding imperialism and conflict and so on, not this stuff where suddenly everybody has more or less the same talking point.
That could also just be an indication that the liberal imperialist media is very efficient at relentlessly drilling the phrases and talking points that their PR people came up with into the heads of their followers through constant repetition.
A great example of this is how the European media when referring to the Ukraine conflict constantly and in unison repeats phrases such as "Putin's war", "unprovoked", "full-scale invasion", etc. They have been doing this day in and day out for over two years now. For a good chunk of the population, at least those who are not yet highly skeptical of the mainstream media, eventually this propaganda works.
Fair point to make.