Hey, both China and Russia have a lot of links to USA activists, left and right. Add to that the prevalence of propaganda bots and we can be sure that misinformation posing as being from "just regular folks" will be arrive on Mastodon soon.
Pursuant to that, I'd advise careful skepticism of "regular folks" on Mastodon pushing specific narratives that happen to harmonize with specific geopolitical aims.
Specifically: Russia wants to push the idea that the US & its government is decaying, can not be trusted, and exiting the Union is ideal. Other key topics include "The US elites just want war". All of those are not true en masse (although there are grains of truth in them: but not the whole truth).
Both China and Russia wants to avoid open discussion of human rights and the justifiable critiques that can be brought to hear on them.
So when you read accounts focusing on those themes or similar
Then you should be aware that, at the least, those people are being played, and at the most, it's a talking points boy under direct control of a foreign service agency. Quite likely it'll be a plausibly deniable contracting agency.
Again: the best lies and best deceptions are mixed truth and falsity. So there are elements of truth in good infowar. That's how they get you.
@pnathan Yep. The idea of memetic warfare (which way predates the invention of the term 'meme' by Dawkins) is that you spread *self-replicating* talking points.
So that it's NOT just the foreign agents who are spreading them; the stories, if juicy and appealing enough, catch fire and spread by themselves through domestic populist networks.
Foreign (and organised domestic, eg 4chan) agents tend to do *amplification*.
Protip: a Twitter account ending in a bunch of numbers is likely fake.
@pnathan (Why fake? Because the bot-herders need LOTS of accounts, ramped up very quickly, so adding numbers on the end is a quick and cheap way to make unique account IDs. Not all 'JaneDoe327463' accounts are fake, but lots of them right now are.)