I am observing a very similar sentiment to Sinophobia, now regarding Russia. Reddit's audience is primarily 80% USA + West EU, and the rest 20% also includes a lot of East Europe and other countries, leaving for 5-10% anti-hatred people. On the other hand, Western world makes up for a mere 12% of the world's population.
This speaks volumes about how majoritarianism is flipped on the internet by Western world to suit their narratives and loudmouth whatever they want dominating in virtual space. And since moderators are also from said Western countries, the biases are completely intentional and systematic.
For all the "human rights" and "no censorship" nonsense these Western countries spout with the assumption of having high horse on moral grounds, they lie a lot systematically.
Just an observation.
censorship ...
there will be a lot more in the future, not only on reddit but also vk & +
leaving for 5-10% anti-hatred people
Does someone being from the USA or Europe automatically make them anti-Russia? Does someone not being from USA or Europe automatically make them pro-Russia?
Isn't assuming either of these things prejudiced (and dare I say perhaps even racist) against both Americans and Europeans?
It's not just Reddit, methinks. I've seen a fair share of russophobia on here too, to be honest. Cold war propaganda still hard at work...
maybe now's a good time to share that Reddit has always had rampant Russophobia. Back in 2016 when the Enough Trump Spam subreddit was made, they added "no xenophobia" to their rules. but every other post was xenophobic towards either Russia, China, or the DPRK. Hell, I got like a thousand downvotes on a comment where I corrected the OP on the reach of DPRK's missiles (it was one of those "oh no, the north koreans are going to nuke us next week" posts), and nearly all of the thousands of comments were calling me a Russian bot, or using slurs to insult me.
Russophobia was a big part of the Democrat's strategy against Trump in that election, claiming that Russia helped Trump win and whatnot. Russophobia is at this point, perhaps, the oldest propagandist tool used by the American state. Ever since the revolution in Russia, and honestly even before it, they scaremongered supporters into supporting whatever it was the politicians or the media wanted them to support, using Russia, the Soviet Union, or Communism (which was tied to the Soviets for them) as the leverage. Black people want rights? can't do that, that's communism, and look at what's going on in the evil USSR. Workers want rights? can't do that, the evil USSR. so on, so forth. It's very disheartening that they still use this tactic today, but it's even more disheartening that in the information age, where anyone can simply look the information up and disprove the propaganda, people still eat the tactic up like day-old fries.
Yes there is a lot of russophobia and sinophobia on the part of conservative elements of society (remnants of anti-bolshevik propaganda), but there is also legitimate concerns against imperialist behavior on all sides. A lot of people you see criticizing Putin for invading territories are the same people you saw criticizing France invading Mali or USA invading Iraq/Afghanistan. A lot of the people here in France concerned with russian invasion of Ukraine are the same people who were very much against France joining NATO.
Not all of us are media-driven puppet who have to choose a side between equally-evil sides. I personally side with the people/communities who struggle against imperialism, whether it's zapatistas in Chiapas, various communities in Rojava, popular movements in Hong Kong, independentists in various french colonies (Guadeloupe, Kanaky, Bretagne), or the people of Ukraine who are facing military invasion at the hand of their former colonizer.
Of course we need to keep a critical look at western propaganda in this matter, and how separatists in certain parts of Ukraine are treated, but that does not mean we should support another colonial empire in this geopolitical game of sociopaths, and it certainly doesn't mean that people disgusted by military invasion saying "fuck putin" on internet forums are puppets of NATO interests.
Though it's fair to point out that the global empathy toward ukrainian people is both media-manufactured and based on ethnocentric principles of "white people are affected" and "it's a European country being invaded, not some African/Asian country". But in order to deconstruct these racist narratives and revive the internationalist movement, it's not a good start to support a dictatorial regime who's rebuilding the former Russian empire, is increasingly reinforcing the cis-heteropatriarchal dogma hand-in-hand with the orthodox fundamentalists, and has zero insightful criticism in regards to its own history of genocide and political repression (against muslim populations of the USSR, against anarchists in Russia/Ukraine, etc).
