Facebook is paying people overseas promoting Alberta separatism

Post by throwaway27448 » Tue, Jun 09, 2026, 8:06 AM UTC

vintermann wrote: post #2

I've said for a while that I think this sort of thing is a much better explanation for trends we see than moustache-twirling foreign dictators "spreading dissent" for the heck of it. Yes, they exist and yes, they have troll factories, but they usually promote narratives with some immediate benefit to themselves. When they do promote irrelevant stuff, I think it's just to build social media clout for their actual mess…

Post by pbiggar » Tue, Jun 09, 2026, 8:09 AM UTC

Post by drysine » Tue, Jun 09, 2026, 8:13 AM UTC

TZubiri wrote: post #8

ifwinterco wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's a meme that most "nationalist" Twitter/X posters in the UK are actually from South Asia, and only doing it because for people in low-income countries the Twitter payments are a viable source of income. I'm not on Twitter anymore thankfully, but when I was there seemed to be a lot of truth to this. It even got to the point of there being successful witch hunts outing quite large/popular accounts as being India…

X famously implemented a feature that revelaed where the posters were from. Sure you can use a VPN, but Musk changed the rules all of a sudden and exposed a lot of accounts posting about issues from other countries. Twitter may have a lot of faults, but they're ahead of Facebook on this one.

Post by throwaway27448 » Tue, Jun 09, 2026, 8:16 AM UTC

a2128 wrote: post #10

throe939494848 wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> when Russian trolls promote both sides Perhaps projection? It is perfectly valid to have different opinions. "Russian trolls" are not some sort of uniform centralized group, that gets directions what to "promote". Some people just have opinions, and do stuff out of conviction, not to get reward.

There is a uniform centralized group that operated for a decade under the name of Internet Research Agency, and almost certainly something like it continues to operate to this day. These had paid employees who got directions on what to promote with the goal of manipulating the public debate. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_Research_Agency

Post by watwut » Tue, Jun 09, 2026, 8:19 AM UTC

throwaway27448 wrote: post #12

vintermann wrote: post #2

I've said for a while that I think this sort of thing is a much better explanation for trends we see than moustache-twirling foreign dictators "spreading dissent" for the heck of it. Yes, they exist and yes, they have troll factories, but they usually promote narratives with some immediate benefit to themselves. When they do promote irrelevant stuff, I think it's just to build social media clout for their actual mess…

> which are things like, "Sanctions on Russian leaders are pointless and counterproductive", "Assad didn't gas anyone", "Actual nazis have the Ukrainian leadership's balls in a vice" etc. What would be the point of that? Wars and support of wars do not generally rely on public support. For instance here in the us, only around 3% of americans vote based on foreign policy. Does it really matter which narrative the mass…