You must not have been online for very long. There’s a ton of bad actors that pose these sort of questions as a challenge rather than actually asking to learn more. Its a bit less common on Lemmy than other social platforms but, you still run into them. That’s why you’ll run into downvotes and aggressive responses. Its a shame that things are like this, but until these bad actors disappear, we’ll continue to see this sort of thing.
To add to eatCasserol’s answer, other peer nations to the US also provide similar forms of foreign aid for similar reasons. The US actually provides less as a percent of GDP (actual numbers are higher though, is my understanding). So this isn’t an exclusively unique US thing.
I’ve been online since 1995 in some way or another.
But Lemmy is uniquely fanatical about this shit. Lemmy and other bits of the fediverse are just in that position right now – they’re on the very edge of the norm, so the people you run into are always on the edge of their respective things too. I’d say most people on the fediverse would be considered early-early adopters. We’re not even in the regular “early adopter” stage yet.
I recommend you check out reddit if you want to see “fanatical”. I put it in quotes because there’s a damn good reason: Reddit has a significant number of “conservative” bad actors. They post absolute nonsense and try to assert its true, or ask “questions” (stuff like is racism really bad or other questions to bring up controversial ideas, and try to brigade and assert extreme views are normal). I feel lemmy is still not popular enough for companies to try to swarm it with bots and influence people, but if it grows, that will become a problem.
Lemmy was already swarmed with bots during the election cycle. If you weren’t paying attention, you wouldn’t have known. Hundreds of ‘can’t vote for harris because of palestine’ bots rose up, convinced people voting for her was just as evil as being an actual nazi, and then as soon as election was over, the accounts all disappeared. I was only following like 13 of them, but all 13 vanished overnight.
Lemmy is absolutely popular enough (and easy enough to automate) that it’s being astroturfed.
I’m not saying it doesn’t happen here, but i feel the extents is hugely different compared to reddit. Trump subreddits and /r/conservative are constant trash and show up on all. Either I don’t see communities that consistently spew propaganda, and disinformation here, or its just not as bad here.
You must not have been online for very long. There’s a ton of bad actors that pose these sort of questions as a challenge rather than actually asking to learn more. Its a bit less common on Lemmy than other social platforms but, you still run into them. That’s why you’ll run into downvotes and aggressive responses. Its a shame that things are like this, but until these bad actors disappear, we’ll continue to see this sort of thing. To add to eatCasserol’s answer, other peer nations to the US also provide similar forms of foreign aid for similar reasons. The US actually provides less as a percent of GDP (actual numbers are higher though, is my understanding). So this isn’t an exclusively unique US thing.
I’ve been online since 1995 in some way or another.
But Lemmy is uniquely fanatical about this shit. Lemmy and other bits of the fediverse are just in that position right now – they’re on the very edge of the norm, so the people you run into are always on the edge of their respective things too. I’d say most people on the fediverse would be considered early-early adopters. We’re not even in the regular “early adopter” stage yet.
I recommend you check out reddit if you want to see “fanatical”. I put it in quotes because there’s a damn good reason: Reddit has a significant number of “conservative” bad actors. They post absolute nonsense and try to assert its true, or ask “questions” (stuff like is racism really bad or other questions to bring up controversial ideas, and try to brigade and assert extreme views are normal). I feel lemmy is still not popular enough for companies to try to swarm it with bots and influence people, but if it grows, that will become a problem.
Lemmy was already swarmed with bots during the election cycle. If you weren’t paying attention, you wouldn’t have known. Hundreds of ‘can’t vote for harris because of palestine’ bots rose up, convinced people voting for her was just as evil as being an actual nazi, and then as soon as election was over, the accounts all disappeared. I was only following like 13 of them, but all 13 vanished overnight.
Lemmy is absolutely popular enough (and easy enough to automate) that it’s being astroturfed.
I’m not saying it doesn’t happen here, but i feel the extents is hugely different compared to reddit. Trump subreddits and /r/conservative are constant trash and show up on all. Either I don’t see communities that consistently spew propaganda, and disinformation here, or its just not as bad here.