Check this link for context, the whole evolution of the conversation is the particularly funny part:
https://ponder.cat/post/2054411/2336210
I also have no idea what they mean talking about Xinxiang (a city in Henan Province) instead of what they and I obviously meant, Xinjiang. It’s easy to write it down as a meaningless typo, but I’m a little bit surprised to see someone who is clearly pushing overt CCP propaganda making an “all those foreigner-letters are basically the same” Westerner mistake.
Maybe that’s a strong argument that they are an honest proponent of this stuff (as well as obviously not real educated about the basics of what they’re talking about), and not part of any CCP influence operation. I just thought it was interesting.
It’s definitely clear to me that there is some kind of organized pro-Russian and anti-Democrat shilling going on on Lemmy. How much, it’s more or less impossible to know.
I was a little bit surprised that Lemmy is worth infiltrating, yes. I think it’s possible that any social media with a presence in the thousands of people is worth the effort. It’s not that strange. Any post on Facebook will have a limited reach, any post on Lemmy will have a limited reach, they’re really not all that tremendously different. I’ve heard other random rumors of people speculating about particular details of how and why, but I think there is more or less no way to know. All I’ve really seen directly is occasional slip-ups of someone pretending to be American when they clearly are not, as well as the obvious pattern of super vocal accounts which push more or less nothing but one particular geopolitically-useful ideology.
From time to time I try to trap them in some sort of bot detection attempt, and it always fails. 🙂
And yes, I have no idea what the connection is between humanspiral and the slrpnk mods, or even if there is one. I just observed that one really weird event and it always sort of stuck in my mind. Also, some of the slrpnk mods were definitely very vigorous leading up to the election in posting “don’t vote for Democrats” stuff and deleting anyone who tried to disagree with it.
I read a report on how a lot of tiny fora, and other sites with comment functions, were getting barraged with russian bot traffic. They use web scrapers to pick up on sites that have comment functions, of any kind, and that tells the bot network to start automated posting there. Often it is so strong they effectively DDOS a lot of these personally run places. However, this account doesn’t feel like that. This leads me to believe one of the possibilities I previously suggested. It is a mod, it is someone with mental illness that, for whatever reason, was having a moment of clarity that one time, or even lemmy is being targeted. If it is targeted, that makes me think that russian prop-pushing organizations have so thoroughly saturated the internet, they now have to seek fringe spaces online, in order to keep quotas, or something like that, up.