US and EU based on when they are active. I recognize the thought process precisely because I used to be like this too. It's easy to ignore nuance and tend towards extremism when you have no real stake in society or responsibility for others.
There is a third category. A lot of these people are legitimately edgy teenagers who haven't studied any history or political science outside of a very tiny socialist (and I use that term lightly, these are mostly anti-west reactionaries) information bubble and simply do not understand the enormity of their own ignorance. It becomes incredibly obvious once you've spent a bit of time engaging with them.
Literally ran a newspaper which espoused democracy and independent governance (Hong Kong status quo at the time).
You might also be interested to learn that democratically elected legislators in Hong Kong were arrested en masse from the floor of their legislative building for the exact same reason. It's as bad as it sounds.
The whole point is to exploit the imprecise nature of the topic to straddle a moral line. The disinformation space benefits from precisely this kind of nihilism because it can argue semantics at a whim, because it has no fixed beliefs. Sartre said it better tbh.
To be extremely clear so that you cannot weasel out of this - what I am referencing was not a semantic argument. These were people actively defending the practice of invading a sovereign nation while openly stating that Ukrainian national identity should be eradicated (muh Lennin created Ukraine), and explicitly defending the mass abduction of children in occupied territories. Alongside the standard emoji spam, of course.
Don't play. You and I both know these are canonical narratives on hexbear.
I'm just glad you guys are out here putting the crazy on display. I was seriously hoping you would.
I like how you conveniently left out the fact that the Hague issued several warrants over this exact issue, after Putin himself openly admitted to mass abduction of children.
Exactly what I thought. It's exactly this kind of weasel word equivocation I figured the admins would be hiding behind when they made that statement. And I pretty much assumed one you would jump in and say it out loud.
The last time I engaged with hexbear users over Ukraine, I got literally ten separate comments defending the mass abduction and deportation of Ukrainian children. And as if that wasn't crass enough, every single one was accompanied by a smug emoji.
Sorry if I don't have the energy for casual genocide denial these days!
The reality is that they aren't even good leftists either. They are constantly saying shit which would get you laughed out of any freshman polisci course. They are low-information, reactionary campists, and the internet deserves a better class of socialist.
Exactly. I have seen no evidence that they have any motivation beyond trolling, and if you look at their instance, it is filled with threads about "dunking on libs" and whatnot. Obviously they are just going to tell you whatever it takes to troll another day, because that's what they do. But if you look broadly at how they participate, it's obvious that when they say "exposure to differing opinions," they mean being aggressive, condescending trolls.
Russian disinformation is generally either refuted in comments or removed by mods
I mean all you have to do is glance at any Ukraine thread on any instance federated with hexbear to know this is a lie.
These people are trolls, plain and simple. The mods/admins are no exception, they are just slightly more self aware than their users when it comes to diplomacy. They will say whatever they think you want to hear in order to get one more day worth of trolling in.
Hexbears are just trolls. They generally aren't coming into threads to have real discussions (and when they make attempts at it they often seem confused about their own stated ideology) - the unstated goal is to be disruptive to deny "shit libs" a platform.
Hexbear is far more obnoxious than lemmygrad imo. At least lemmygrad doesn't turn every thread into a middle school "#random" message board by filling it with cringe jpeg emojis.
US and EU based on when they are active. I recognize the thought process precisely because I used to be like this too. It's easy to ignore nuance and tend towards extremism when you have no real stake in society or responsibility for others.