instance-level signals
- brand new account with no post history outside political threads
- account from a known bad-faith/large general purpose instance (lemmy.world etc) that only ever shows up in communist/.ml communities
content signals
- “both sides” framing but applied asymmetrically, equating us imperialism with defensive responses from targeted states
- humanitarian interventionism: “but what about the people of x” used specifically to justify nato/us positions
- treats western ngos and media as neutral baseline, demands extraordinary evidence for any counter-narrative
- whataboutism that only ever runs one direction, deflects from western atrocities but never from the targets of western aggression
- “im a leftist but…” followed by a position you could copy paste from a state dept briefing
- disproportionate focus on us adversaries (china, russia, cuba, dprk, venezuela, iran) with zero comparable scrutiny of us allies
- concern trolling about “authoritarianism” that somehow only ever applies to socialist states
behavioral signals
- posts consistently during us business hours
- only shows up when a specific topic is active, disappears otherwise
- never updates their position no matter what evidence you put in front of them, the argument is purely performative
- high comment to post, or post to comment ratio, always replying never posting, reactive disruption pattern
- posts are concentrated in the same few communities, often with overlap between suspected accounts suggesting coordinated targeting
I check at least two of those behavioral signals because I post to avoid working 😔
to be fair a lot of this is just libs. a couple of these points are just me ie i’m always just replying instead of posting. i can be a bit provocative with the more fascist leaning libs too, yeah.
i think it is useful to spot feds, but it’s not worth being overly paranoid.
it’s not that cia agents sound like liberals, but rather that liberals sound like cia agents. liberal parrot these points because it’s what’s been propagated through psyops to promote the us rhetoric. i made this kind of like a meme, it’s worth keeping in mind but i’m not saying to use this orthodoxically to 100% confirm they are a fed.
posts consistently during us business hours
I think the ones on Lemmy work out of USEUCOM, so they’re on Central European Time.
… but lemmy is one of the best ways to avoid working. lol
it makes sense, i actually was inspired by your post, and tried to compile what’s essentially the very tiring and repeated arguments they use and ended up writing this. i honestly believe you could wire up a bot to reply to them, because there’s literally so few “arguments” that could be debunked with a parenti quote.
one thing i noted from your post is that you’ve mentioned high post to comment ratio, but you didn’t mention numbers and in my experience there are probably 2 groups, one that only want to post propaganda to get upvotes and the other that focuses on spreading imperialism in the comment section.
We could set up a bot. So could they.
Did you notice that those accounts never post or comment on lemmy.ml, even though they’re not banned? They know they’d get a wall of text if they did.
im not saying we should set up a bot, just that the arguments are so repetitive that they end up being formulaic.
i guess maybe they realized that they couldn’t do much psyops here so they’re focusing on liberal instances. i might be losing my mind but i can’t think of piefed as anything but a psyop.
you are almost describing me
25-ish years ago; when i used to volunteer for the green party; i would invariably (and very publicly) be accused of being a fed.
since then, i’ve learned it’s because my autism triggers normie’s distrust and every time i see one of these i wonder to myself how i look/sound/act like the person in the meme. lol
THERE ARE FEDS IN MY WALLS THERE ARE FEDS IN MY WALLS THERE ARE FEDS IN MY WALLS THERE ARE FEDS IN MY WALLS THERE ARE FEDS IN MY WALLS THERE ARE FE…
