I want to draw attention to the elephant in the room.
Leading up to the election, and perhaps even more prominently now, we've 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 "to the left of them"
- 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 they're accomplishing is pretty plain to see, in my opinion. It's 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 we're 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 it's 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 wouldn't 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, we're 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 it's why they're targeting us here.
Stop being an easy target. Stop feeding the cuckoo.
In a sense yes, people generally tell the truth more than they lie so the default assumption should be that someone is telling the truth, otherwise you enter into paranoia. That assumption can be broken when there is a clear gain from lying. Eg. You catch a thief outside the store they robbed they have a very clear reason to lie and say they were just walking by.
You're explanation on why they're lying isn't very clear. First off, you fail to name who these people are and leave it ambiguous to let the person reading fill it in with their enemy (maga, nazis, russians etc.) just like every other conspiracy theory. Since the subject isn't clear neither is the motive, you just sort of fill that in with "they hate the left, why do they hate the left? What are they gaining from convincing maybe a couple dozen liberals that the democrats suck on a very marginal social media? This isn't the politburo for the comintern, there is barely any power on here to diffuse, so why put effort into doing so when there are far larger platforms to influence.
I'd like to draw a parallel to data security. Why make a strong password if nobody's out there trying to break into accounts? Why secure your server's ports if nobody's going to attack them? Why take precautions against malicious collection of data to sell to third parties if we're not sure who or how that data would be used?
These are behaviors that we don't know the specific motivations for, we don't know the individual bad actors in question or who they're working for or what their specific plans are. But we know that if someone calls you claiming to be Geeksquad and tells you to go buy a bunch of gift cards to read to them over the phone, you're being scammed. We know that if someone pretends to be a representative of a company and comes asking for your password, you shouldn't trust them. We know that if certain kinds of traffic are spamming your ports looking for vulnerabilities, they don't mean well.
Why? Because we are aware of the threat vector and can move to protect it before knowing the details of who in particular is planning on exploiting it. I don't need to know specifically which hacker wants to break into my server to limit open ports. I don't need to know who wants to steal my Steam account to know setting up 2fA is worthwhile.
Assuming good faith in bad actors is a vulnerability. The exploit vector is an attack on the political power of the left. I don't need to know specifically who is behind it. I could speculate. Maybe it's MAGA, maybe it's Russia, maybe it's some foreign bot-farm being hired by some other authoritarian regime, but that doesn't really matter. What matters is that allowing the threat vector to remain open disempowers the left.
Why Lemmy? Why a small niche leftist platform rather than a larger platform?
Let's say you're a time traveler who hates punk music. What would be more effective to stop it before it starts? Sabotaging the planning for the Warped Tour in the 90s, or burning down CBGB in 1973?
CBGB was a small club at the time, barely notable at all. The Warped Tour, on the other hand, was a massive endeavor involving dozens of bands and thousands upon thousands of punk and ska fans. But if you know your history, you know that CBGB was a small venue with a massive impact on the American punk scene. It was a place where a lot of the bands that we know today got their start and came up. The Warped Tour, on the other hand, while probably influential on 90s teenagers who got to go see 20 bands in person for 20 bucks, was mostly just riding the wave of punk's popularity and capitalizing it.
Targeting leftist spaces, especially small leftist spaces, could potentially be much more effective than targeting more general spaces. Lemmy in particular selects not only for leftists, but for anti-corporate, anti-establishment people with enough of an interest in tech and enough social media presence to jump on the bandwagon of a relatively unknown protocol just so they don't have to rely on corporate social media. It has a barrier for entry that most of the public find to be either too daunting to bother to surmount, or that involves enough obscurity that they're not even aware of it to begin with.
Beehaw in particular has human-vetted signups and even has a history of defederating with instances that have open sign-ups in order to be able to deal with moderation. A lot of that moderation is literally just contending with social conservatives who show up spouting racism, queerphobia, sexism, and ablism.
In other words, we are a small space that caters to a particular crowd of people well outside the mainstream politically, socially, and technologically. Small, niche spaces have a tremendous potential for resulting in wider-spread influence.
It's not about convincing us that democrats suck. Most of us aren't particularly happy with the democratic establishment anyway. It's about demotivating us and frustrating our internal communications. It's about trying to sabotage a potential locus for resistance.
And it isn't just Lemmy. It isn't even just the left that's being targeted. We know social media is being used to pollute discourse and manipulate politics. We know there's an artificial rightward push going on, and we know that it isn't just the United States that's being targeted with it. But anyone who wants to advance this artificial rightward push has a strong motivation to exploit any vulnerabilities that can be found in the US because of our position globally. Now that that position is crumbling, they have a strong motivation to make sure it doesn't recover.
We have a responsibility to address that threat vector no matter who those parties are.