Well... they are

I love that Lemmy is building its own collection of epic moments.

It's a double joke, it's literally an adaptation of a Russian meme of "I is simple Russian worker Ivan from city Tver, we very respect mighty jade rod comrade Xi, every week we discuss achievements of Chinese leader and communist party, a hit", roughly translating the grammar.

https://pikabu.ru/story/ya_prostoy_rabochiy_ivan_iz_gorod_tver_8094383

^that kind

Ah, yes. As a patriotic American I love our warm water ports like Corpus Christi and Tampa. Don't you love warm water ports as well?

foreign grifters

I think its far more likely for GOP/MAGA to be buying twitter "engagement" on Fiver, than grifters "launching influencer careers" by directing MAGA fans to their other socials? or spamming affiliate purchase links on twitter?

A key question/reality check is that instead of treating MAGA fanaticism as foreign agent propaganda, it is GOP propaganda outsourced to cheapest providers.

There is a lot of foreign support for Trump among foreigners and immigrants (prior to elections anyway). What they all have in common is a hatred for the US, and a deep thirst for trans/woke outrage click bait. While it doesn't affect foreigners in any good way, "at least he's doing a great job on the mexican rapist invaders" is only point of approval support remaining. Really, where Trump fanaticism was resurected was purely on anger towards a trans inclusive world order. Every other policy is just brainwashing people who come for the anti-trans circlejerk, but stay for the tax cuts for oligarch climate terrorists.

It’s targetting mainly the MAGAs because they’re the less intellectually capable population

I've seen a flood of "I'm a Palestinian who is struggling to survive, please send me money" posts and PMs on BlueSky and Instagram and other liberal-leaning social media. Folks love to believe their team is the "smarties" and the opposition is the "dummies". Nobody likes to believe they'd be ripe for exploitation.

Consequently, your refusal to believe in your own gullibility and bias opens you up to scammers.

I bet this whole phenomenon is mainly a “emergent property” of the rewards and access structures in place in Social Media and that the top-down organised ops from state actors are but a tiny fraction of this shit show.

Like everything else capitalist, it starts out as an independent venture and congeals into national industry as the rate of return grows. The modern era of internet scamming is just the latest in a long history of affinity scams and MLM schemes. People are drawn in out of fear, confusion, and desperation. And because the better scammers know to tip their political overclass, these scam factories tend to be insulated from any kind of regulation or public prosecution.

Some say that there are no humans on the internet.

That propaganda won't work comrade Ivan, we all know there no gay farmers in Vladivostok. Our wise government made sure of it!

But yeah, jokes aside, it's currently a crime to support LGBT in russia. Being gay = being rebel against regime, cause real rebels either already dead, in prison or fled. Next in line, if I would guess, would be jews I think.

Because russia is not a democracy and an average russian is staying away from politics due to learned helplessness. Because of multiple factors, even protests won't change anything. You can call for sabotage, but that isn't what an average person would do.

Besides, their internet is far more restricted. They don't have access to twitter. They use vk and registration there essentially requires a gov id, 1 per citizen.

Not sure whether this is serious, but to provide a serious answer: you can't create a healthy democracy by spreading misinformation. Misinformation that's aligned with your agenda might help push it in the short term, but it also undermines trust (in this case trust in what the average person is saying, since you can't tell who genuine participants in a discussion are). In a low trust environment, people tend to gravitate toward big personalities and believe sources and make decisions based on their own gut feelings (i.e. their personal prejudices) rather than on things like people's real experiences and accurate information from trusted institutions.

Demagogues like Putin thrive in this environment because ultimately they don't have (or care about) solutions to the average person's problems. They get by based on personality, stoking prejudice etc. But policies that are based on the truth and what the average person actually needs suffer.

Live in Youngstown. It is a full of Midwestern turds. They should have flushed the whole city down the toilet when the steel left.

"People fall for it"

checks the accounts of people responding positively to the post

they're all bots

You missed the point. Twitter just revealed that many of the deranged MAGA influencers are from outside the US.

The main issue with MAGA is actually foreigners! Suprise surprise. That is what the meme is making fun of.

While I think there is a huge honegrown issue, the foreign influence is another gigantic problem that can't be ignored and it was just 100% proven.

It is possible to care about multiple things at a time

Foreigners are just the "others" used by the elites to point the tribalist weak minded morons towards somebody else whilst the very much local elites pillage the place.

And this is not just done to the MAGA muppets: notice the whole bitching and moaning about "foreign interference" from the rest - guess what, the influence of the likes of Russia and even China have in countries like the US is fucking nothing next to that of the local traditional fatcats owning the Press and Tech-bros owning social media or even in relative terms that cultivated by the kind of Propaganda ops we see in action here in the most popular Lemmy.world forums.

Fuck, if you want to worry about Foreign Actors, look at how Israel got most of the West, especially the US, to basically destroy in non-aligned countries at least half a fucking century of cultivate image of being Rule Of Law abiding and Freedom Promoting, which amongst other things resulted in some of those now turning towards Russia or China - all this shit to protected the fucking modern day Nazis whilst they get off from murdering little brow children.

The supposed Leftwing of the US (but not really: in World terms the Democrats are a hard Right party, just ultra Capitalist Neolibs rather than Fascists) are just as much doing the whole "it's those scary foreigners" smoke and mirrors show to turn the mob eyes away from their sponsors as the Fascists, it's just that in their propaganda the cartoonish bad guys are "state actors" rather than "immigrants".

And all the fucking shit in the US (not just the propaganda but its use to distract the crowd from the pillaging by the likes of the Finance Industry, "realestate investors" and other parasites) is leaking to the rest of the World and accelerating the shitstorm elsewhere.