I’ve opened Lemmy today to lots of anti Canadian sentiment on any recent comments about how messed up 'murica is and it’s constant attacks on Canadian sovereignty.
Don’t get sucked in. Let them yell into a void. The online campaign has begun in earnest on Lemmy and it’s time to point it out and recognise it for what it is.
These are not real people. They are actors trying to affect our decisions as always happens when American exceptionalism is challenged. Our government had the balls to stand up and say no. We have the balls to do the same. They do not like it and will attack you for it.
Don’t fall for the bait.
This is likely starting because of a pending Federal election.
https://deanblundell.substack.com/p/the-disinformation-war-against-mark?triedRedirect=true
I havent seen those comments yet but as an american ill do my best to call em out when i do🫡
I’ve only ever met friendly fun rational folks with a passion for hockey who are warm, inviting and willing to fight for what’s right. I’ll put this sentiment out here: don’t mistake kindness for weakness. Keep up the good work Canada.
Anti-Canadian Americans, and their treasonous stooges up here in Canada can eff aboot and find oot.
Canadians can do tough. I’ll half starve myself for the rest of my natural life out of spite. These lazy hate mongers that think we’re going to cave if we don’t eat a Big Mac should google Canadian soldiers and the history of the Geneva conventions.
Sure it’s going to be tough to do without all those American products. I think more and more Canadians every day are saying “who cares”. If I can’t find a non American substitute, I’m going to simply not buy it at all.
Elbows up, my friends. It’s gonna be a long winter but if anything, we’re used to winters.
The world will only be a better place if these people self identify more quickly. I mean, it would be better if they do not exist but, since they do, I am very supportive of them expressing their opinions so that I do not have to waste time discovering them.
I don’t know if this is true on not but in the settings for your account it has a toggle to not allow bot comments to show up. It might only work for people that select the “bot account” option but just in case it’s an auto filter I’d say try it out, I have felt like I’ve not seen bots since moving over from reddit
Don’t fight it, lean into it. Fuck with their heads. But lean into it in a back handed way that fucks with them. They have a prepared Rolodex. Go outside of it and you win
No, don’t give them any energy. Save it for what’s necessary and useful.
Only Nazis hate Canadians. Because we are very good at destroying Nazis. It’s our national past time.
I would like “Kills Nazis” to be a common, simple part of Canadian identity, like hockey and manners. Basically, I want this:
“Oh Bob? Yeah he’s just a good old Canadian boy. Smooth wristshot, absolute sniper. Always helps his neighbour shovel the walk. There was a demonstration by a bunch of those “Sons of Odin” fuckers downtown last week and he stopped by to huck bricks at them and protect counterprotestors. You know, we should have him over for a beer and some steaks”
“Sons of Odin” ? Is this a white supremacist gang like KKK, Nazis, etc or your own word choice?
Sons of Odin are a Canadian white supremacist movement with Viking inspired iconography and a stated mission to “stop the spread of Shariah Law”. They were started in 2018 and started with a very media-savvy push as a “service organization” doing park clean ups and handing out water and granola bars to homeless people. Their intent was to grow to spread their Xenophobia and anti-islamic rhetoric.
They aren’t a large group, maybe 15k members coast to coast and that’s spread pretty thinly. As for why I picked them? I dunno- memorable name and more “Canadian” than name dropping the Klan.
We’ve got monuments in Europe for it and everything
I’m guessing whomever/wherever you’re seeing is either defederated or, more likely, blocked by me. In any case, pay them no mind if you do see them.
This guys right, we gotta try not to feed the trolls.
Also don’t be a sucker! https://youtu.be/vGAqYNFQdZ4
No feed them. “Dont feed the trolls” is how the left has been losing so much political and social capital the past decade. People are all conflict adverse they’ve forfeited so much ground online and socially. I can tell you all the talking points on the right, I couldn’t tell you any on the left let alone anyone who is a good source of information because “doing feed the trolls” results in no left leaning voices or spaces that matter. Instead over feed them. The one thing the left has going for it is there are more of us. We need to use that to our advantage. The advantage being if we realized this, we could have 10 messages for everyone of theirs. Which is what the right has done instead for the past decade. They flood every space they can. Hell I still see them on over passes, in the news, on podcasts, in comedy. Take it all back. Stop the mentality that we win when we don’t engage. We don’t. We win when they’re exhausted not us
I enter civil discourse with opposing views all day erryday, but that’s a nice point. We need values but I think the order of operations should be to engage civily, agree to disagree, then finally block so they don’t feel empowered by their position.
I disagree, I think there’s a lot of people who think they need to bring some kind of argument and logic that will blow them out of the water. Meanwhile they’re having fun because their strategy is to exhaust you until you block them. But people never learned how fun it is to exhaust them back. If we’re all so smart, everyone keeps saying they’re idiots, then beat them at their own game. But if you block, you lose. Get them to push themselves back into their corners by having them hit the block button.
In theory I’d love that, I give into the trolling but try to keep it to a minimum.
Children are watching and when everyone is slinging shit, they just see shit covered adults and that’s almost worse than losing a voter. Losing the next gen
I love Nothmexico!
Lol wut. I think its bots. Very few people hate Canadians.
Give it a few months. The right wing propaganda machine always finds a way.
I wanted to ask - Where on the fediverse are people seeing this? I took a quick peek at lemmy.world/c/politics and lemmy.world/c/world (in particular https://lemmy.world/post/26969666 ) and I didn’t see anything like what this post is describing there.
A lot of the comments from this post point to examples from Spez’s site or Musk’s site, which would make more sense to me. But lemmy? C’mon…
If I had to guess, it would be hexbear.
As someone who lives in America, I would like to say, please keep it up my Canadian friends! The more the rest of the world buys and builds their own, the more you undermine Lil Donnie’s Fascist Clown Show, and create better options for everyone in the long-term.
Breaking U.S. tech dominance is one of the best ways to put some equality back in the world.
As a Canadian, I’m worried that this stoking of anti-Canadian sentiment among the right wing in the US is a pretext to an invasion to try to make good on the “51st state” promise.
Entirely possible. We’ve seen it before with other countries and now it’s been turned on us. We never should have been so close with the US. Now it’s time to disentangle.
As a fellow American, I have nothing but love for our Canadian neighbors!
Whatever happens the next few years, I can only hope we get the opportunity to have an election and vote some adults back in, and start repairing relationships. Yes, I threw up a little with that. 😒.
Definitely not the case that all USians are following the current mad prez…
Heck, Canada remains a favourite for many from the US still, see https://www.thepinknews.com/2025/03/12/donald-trump-transphobia-us-family-seeking-asylum/ (and good luck to them!)
I’m not seeing a lot of this thankfully — makes me wonder if a lot of these anti-Canada posts are coming from a particular instance I’ve already blocked.
First thing that came across my mind when i read this post, “oh thats what hexbears up to now.”
???
I mean like them or not I don’t think Hexbear users would be doing that. They’d be excited to see the isolation and collapse of the US empire.
Idk what they stand for. I never actually understood what they valued or were trying to accomplish. To me, they seemed like trolls who had nothing better to do than pick an arguments on the interent with no real goal except to pwn the internet. They just annoyed me and i blocked them
Theyre the only instance i have blocked, and since i hadnt seen anything that OP was referring to, i assumed it was them
Edit:typos
Canada’s still part of the West. Therefore, evil and bad according to those folk.
It’s just ramping up on the bot farms, they’re really looking for angles to blame Canada for bird flu and just being rude (irony, I know).
It’s been slow to get traction, most people don’t care and don’t want a political fight this soon after the election.
I don’t think the bot farms will be targeting the six of us on Lemmy who are all relatively technically inclined. Probably aimed at the masses on the larger platforms.
Find a Lemmy app that has user tagging (I use Voyager, and previously Connect) and when you see these users make a note of each one with a red tag so they stand out when you’re browsing.
You’ll start to see the bastards turning up in all kinds of conversations as well as posting ridiculous shit. That’s what I did with the Russian/American trolls/bots during the american election. Very enlightening to see in a political thread who the repeat offender shit-disturbers are so you can down vote, argue with, or report them instead of blocking them and allowing their infection to spread.
Tagging is handy for nice people as well; the community of people around you on Lemmy starts to look more familiar, smaller, and friendlier than you realize, and dick heads become easier to spot.
seems like a lot more work than blocking them. engagement and arguments is what they want so they get an excuse to say even more of their stupid shit.
@cheeseburger @Perhapsjustsniffit Oh thats a good one. Thanks for the tip
Wow, as a computer dunce I had never heard of tagging. Alway, I’ve managed to do it. Very interesting idea. Thank you.
Some kind of crowd-sourced tagging would be a cool anti-troll technique. A lot of less experienced websurfers struggle to spot “inauthentic behaviour” (bots, astroturfing, etc) so it could be beneficial. Reddit has a huge problem with sleeper accounts though, where they build up reputation with low-effort comments over years, then activate when a campaign needs them. The social media marketers seem to sometimes use the same techniques as the state-sponsored troll farms.
Every single social platform has tried to do this and failed. Once a platform reaches critical mass the bits, scammers, etc… move in and start exploiting any “honour” mechanism that might exist.
Probably the best I’ve come across is ycombinator news but that’s pretty niche.
There was a reddit add on that showed when a user had negative karma in certain subs, and you could edit the sub list and karma threshold on your own. Organic downvotes were something that was very difficult for bots and scammers (and nazis) to avoid
I wish that there was a browser plug-in for Lemmy that would replicate the “Mass Tagger” that was available for Reddit.
This does seem handy. Also why doesn’t Voyager remember previously created tags and let you pick them quickly?
I just switched to Voyager (from Jerboa, which did everything I thought I needed, until now), because of this post. I can absolutely see the value of tagging, and I am jumping in, starting with tagging everyone in this thread with a red-and-white “coureur des bois” tag.
How do you use the tagging feature? I’m on Voyager too, when I click on a user profile I don’t see any tagging options. Only block and send message.
Go to Settings->User Tags -> Enable User Tags.
Then you’ll see the option in the user profile.
Hot damn, you’re a gem, thank you!! That’s super useful. :)
Don’t forget to tag yourself!
How’d you tag yourself? After enabling the feature, under my profile I only see “Mod Logs”.
Edit: also thanks for showing that I can separate the vote counts, I clearly haven’t explored the app enough 😅.
I long press a user name to edit and set tags, including my own!
I feel you though, I never used to bother too much with settings and purposefully stuck to defaults unless I had an issue, but since I’ve been using more FOSS apps I’m finding my defaults mantra to be very limiting. Many times I can have a great experience with ten minutes of tinkering I wasn’t willing to do before.
Ahh, I gotcha, now that is a useful shortcut. Thank you!
Hahaha yeah, I’ve been seeing that with FOSS apps too as I’ve been slowly diving into them more. The current climate has really been quite the impetus.
Using Connect rn, can I ask what prompted the switch to Voyager? Connect seems pretty solid so far.
The short version is Voyager will also keep track of how many times I’ve up or down voted someone once user tagging is enabled. That’s killer because it naturally tags users I’ve come into contact with even if I didn’t set a specific tag for them. Then I start to recognize users from my up and down votes and maybe set a specific tag from there.
I still have Connect installed, I used it for my first year here since it was a close experience to Relay For Reddit, and the Dev is Canadian. I like the way Connect looks a little better, and it has a much nicer comment draft/preview system.
After running both together for a while, I found Voyager’s entire user tagging system, with tracking and a summary of all tags and votes I’ve set, to be extremely valuable info. It has a lot of great features like Connect, but it’s FOSS as well, so maybe a higher chance someone will improve the features I use in the future. I have stuck with it now for the last 9 months or so, it’s great.
I personally skipped Connect because it was clear from the post phrasing they had moved from it to Voyager already. I like to learn from others where I can, but have zero exposure to Connect so cannot answer you fully.
Did you get my other comment as a reply to you? I was replying to cheeseburger lol so I’m wondering if it’s my app or yours
Nesting is hard
You can just block/report the bad actors too, if you don’t have the patience to deal with their bullshit. Out of sight, out of mind.
This is a bad idea. It’s what started Reddit going to shit.
Explain how a client-side note that I personally set to remind me of information I learned about someone a bad idea that will ruin Lemmy?
Because politically some people are so adverse to conflict they use client side notes to dig little burrows for themselves. Meanwhile the other groups love conflict, they thrive on it and will invade every burrow they come across like Foxes. What this means is all the good spaces get taken over much quicker when one whole group of afraid prey like people try to avoid mean comments they don’t agree with. It results in this internet red carpet being laid out across these platforms for rapid take over. One of the first things I saw suggested wherever a subreddit would go pro trump was the regular people suggesting apps that let people know not to engage with certain power users. It was like a landing party sent to soften up the local militia
Well, I’m tagging you now…
Yea that doesn’t change what I said. There’s only so many corners left to run to online. There’s a reason for that.
If you’ve given up, I can’t do anything about that. But if you are willing to fight back, I’ll defend your right to be a free voice.
I would also like to know how that works.
Canada gov should ban X, at least for pre-election
X should be banned full stop.
Truth Social as well
Facebook as well
Facebook especially
That is a given, I have never seen it advertised in anyway up here though.
Government should be supporting democracy by providing publicly funded and managed spaces for debate and the release of information, especially government information. Abandoning these spaces to corporations is abdication of responsibility and compromises our democracy. It is not necessary to ban X, but it is not acceptable to require people to use X just to receive information from or communicate with our own public services.
I really like that idea. The government runs Canada Post as a crown corporation. The government could set up a crown corporation to facilitate the online messaging of Canadian citizens without subjecting them to ads and invasive tracking.
Or they could make it part of CBC’s/Radio Canada’s mandate.
I have long believed that the CBC’s role should include making broadcast media accessible to citizens, but perhaps IT and communication services could be a new department. Internet is critical to both state and citizens, and should definitely be a government service! Oh, shit, I just got a cease and desist letter from Bell, Rogers and Telus the moment after I typed that sentence.
Like a USENET server at the very least.
Charlie Angus created a petition for this. https://www.ourcommons.ca/petitions/en/Petition/Details?Petition=e-5359
Signed!
I have signed that once, maybe twice.
I remember we made a petition to the Canadian government about getting on the fediverse, and it got enough signatures. The response made me think they couldn’t even figure out what that meant.
