At this point it’s painfully obvious that it’s a lot of bots seeding the comments and then libs regurgitating all the same talking points. Reddit has basically become this sort of entity where you just need a few bots to get the ball rolling and then everyone falls into line. Which is hilariously on display when you see everyone calling every other subreddit an echo chamber, or when you see how common certain phrases show up on reddit. “unhinged”, “mental gymnastics”, and other rhetoric that tried to dehumanize the other party/group/individual basically in any exchange. I recently noticed this since Hexbear and Lemmygrad has it’s own lingo of sorts and it doesn’t fall in line with reddit’s lol.
Point is, the image that you get of the political mood in society if you just look at online social media is deliberately and heavily manipulated.
I still need to read Manufacturing Consent, but this became glaringly obvious to me after reading Inventing Reality. I think this is what sets ours Lemmy instances apart from other social media in a lot of ways. It cracked me up earlier today on a reddit post about how it turns out China is basically taking over in the technological innovation department since the US is too busy feeding the war machine, and it was just comment after comment saying how China stole everything and don’t care about patent laws(lol…). It was just like 400 of the same fucking comment man, and like one guy saying he moved to China last year and it’s a lot nicer than the States. This post coming the same week as the US churning out 25 new laws aimed against China and shoving something like $30 billion into the anti-China propaganda machine. Not suspicious…
As long as you that’s all that matters. The bureaucracy is just necessary fluff.