I wouldn’t have much/any that the author doesn’t.

I don’t know as much about CVLT/764, there’s better info about them on Wikipedia than I can give offhand, but Order of Nine Angles is an influence on them. It’s… strange. It’s essentially an antisocial (as in, misanthropic) “Satanist Nazism” occult network that actively encourages the worst kind of crimes against people (no need to list them). They’re notably more political than the other sadist/extortion groups mentioned, but still not primarily political. They also encourage members to infiltrate organisations, I forget what they call this, so there are a lot of them infiltrating neo-nazi orgs who absolutely hate O9A for proliferating accelerationism and CSAM in their networks.

More info on 764 and related; obvious trigger warnings: https://unicornriot.ninja/2024/sextortion-coms-inside-a-vile-child-exploitation-cult-run-by-nazi-linked-teens/

Selected quotes:

The group [764] became so notorious that the white supremacist group White Lives Matter started utilizing a Telegram bot on their channels to automatically prevent any user associated with the Com from joining their chats.

Some of the Com members have now tried to start legitimate national socialist groups or have joined existing ones to varied degrees. Some have taken to spamming national socialist chats with both gore and CSAM. In one Telegram channel, for instance, they openly argue that it’s ok to extort and abuse young girls if they are not white. […] All of this is very inconvenient for many traditional National Socialists given how fond they are of claiming pedophilia is a left-wing problem, or related to what they view as homosexual degeneracy. And although there is a well documented history of some neo-Nazis being charged with sex crimes, such as James Mason, the Com movement may be a bridge too far for many of them.

It’s important to emphasise that the notably strong connection between neo-Nazi groups and child abuse still exists even when disregarding O9A/764/etc., but those groups being so common among the far-right political sphere is telling.

Ah that’s fair enough, Australian English is a strange blend sometimes.

Important stuff. It’s nice to see the unmasking and prosecution of 764, O9A and other related network members, but ultimately this is whack-a-mole and people need to be aware of, and aware of how to protect against, sadistic predators online.

It seems Pauline doesn’t care much about domestic violence, but you’re here proposing international violence!

This post in the /c/australia community is about an Australian politician.

There was an opinion article I glanced at which talks about this, Hanson is in touch with some, such as “Men’s Rights Activists” (a manosphere phenomenon, not to be confused with gender liberationists who fight for the rights of men)

Pauline Hanson’s domestic violence comments were no stumble

Which then reminds me of that fire drill in school where a teacher left the stove on, leading to an actual fire alarm (no damage)

Oh, right, safe phones for situations such as domestic abuse. I wasn’t sure what they meant, and in the confusion I started wondering about whether the alert would trigger those phone-detonated bombs you see in spy films.

That’s a good idea, do you think “Overseas News for Oz 🦘” is clear enough for the title? It’s less exact, so that it can be shorter.

I’m interested, I haven’t seen Lemmy helper bots in action yet so I’m curious. Cloudflare might be a problem you’d need to negotiate with the admin.

As you suspect, and I agree, most rule breaking on this site will either be users who’ve skipped over the rules, or have forgotten them when posting quickly. So a simple, nonthreatening reminder should be adequate, without making good-faith users feel uncomfortable. I suggest something like “Thanks for posting. Please review the rules in our sidebar, and then downvote this reply to confirm, otherwise your post may be automatically deleted after an hour. Most importantly, make sure your post body includes an explanation of why this news is relevant to an Australian perspective - you can do this by editing your post if needed.” - it’s snappy, and it shouldn’t surprise anyone who didn’t pay much attention.

I don’t know how necessary this bot will be, but we can make it low-risk of malfunctioning and use it as a low-stakes experiment that other comms can be inspired by, so if you’re itching for a project, then feel welcome!

I think it’s a good thing, I wondered something similar after reading itk’s reply where they gave examples of them showing the link.

Would it work? The more time I spend online, I suspect more and more people just aren’t being taught anymore to read the rules of a community before tapping and typing. But perhaps here is different! And it just means we may need to teach newcomers. It’s a small enough community to test that, and I’ve even seen larger subreddits like /r/historymemes enact a similar “explain your post” rule with reasonable success.

Facebook is literally full of people inciting others to break laws breaking laws and Facebook refuses to remove anything. Even violent incitement I’m seeing

Yes, stochastic terrorism is a real tactic for violence, and Facebook is one of the social media platforms enabling it.

For what it’s worth, I managed to get rid of FB around 5-10 years ago (apart from recently creating a false identity sockpuppet recently due to That One Messenger Group you just can’t move off the site!) and it’s a small but sure weight off shoulders. That and Twitter are two of the worst mainstream sites, life is better without them at this point.

This is what you get when your community is called “worldnews”.

Very true. If the comm users decide we do want to narrow our scope, then I’m open to the idea of archiving this community and recreating it as “overseasnews” - it wouldn’t take much effort and migrating to a new comm is easier done sooner than later when it’s grown more.

I’m also considering adding an attention-grabbing Australian emoji to the comm title (“Overseas News 🦘”, "Overseas News 🇦🇺 ", “Overseas News 🪃”) in the hopes it will make visitors finding it from other instances pause and notice that we’re Australian.

Thanks for the examples, and I think it’s great that you chose to relate some of them to Australia in their post body (e.g. “You reckon the same for us?”) to start a discussion, even if it didn’t get the expected conversation.

The reality is that Lemmy is 99% American and almost all content/news that is American gets the engagement

I’d assume it’s lower, but yes. On the other hand, I assume the majority of users active on aussie.zone are Australian, including users registered on other instances but subscribing to our communities, and that people choosing to use aussie.zone want to see more locally-relevant posts, with the option of using communities on other instances for the international content that all the American users promote to the top. Which is a big part of why I assumed this community should provide a counterpoint, being a place where (e.g.) Australia-Fiji relations have a chance at hitting the front page, which would have no chance in a regular World News comm.

But on the other hand, I do think there’s value in having the kinds of posts you’ve listed to draw comparisons and start locally-relevant discussions. And since this comm isn’t very busy, there isn’t much risk of US-centric content dominating any regional-specific posts.

I think there’s value in sharing articles that address global events from an Australian perspective, and discussing those events from an Australian perspective.

I completely agree. What I’m on the fence about is whether that article needs to be explicit in that Australian perspective, even if our community can discuss any global event from our perspective. A part of me thinks that the ABC reporting that a powerful world leader on the other side of the globe has died is obviously relevant globally and therefore to Australians, but that a generic ABC article which just announces the event might just lead to generic comments, while an article which explicitly discusses Australia’s relationship with that leader, or Australian reactions to that leader, would provide that Australian perspective.

I’d also say from a more practical. community averages less than a post a day. [snip]

That’s a good point. I may be too enthusiastic with the gavel and risk chilling the community over me being pedantic. And that’s obviously not a good thing.

I agree that US strikes on Iran would be world news, and would be perfectly appropriate for a general world news community, but I don’t agree that they are a fit for Overseas News, as an Aussie-focused community (as our sidebar discusses).

I’m aware that the address of this community is /c/worldnews, unfortunately we can’t change that without recreating the entire community, but we have since rebranded to Overseas News to avoid being redundant and provide a useful space for our regional news, as there are many federated World News communities for users to subscribe to.

Unions have inflated this protest balloon, known as “Scabby the Cat”, outside the port. (ABC Pilbara: Andrew Seabourne)

The survey also found that current vaping among 18-to-24-year-olds fell from a high of 20.6% in 2022–23 to 14%, while daily vaping remained stable across all age groups. This differed from previous surveys which reported rising vaping rates.

That’s good to see, it’s already concerningly normalised in a couple of my social circles.

Military has a long history of hardcore drugs. There is an infamous history of WWII militaries using amphetamines (esp. in Allied militaries) and methamphetamines (in Axis militaries, brand name Pervitin) as performance enhancing drugs. You want a sneak peak into what Discordia’s drug-dazed war has in store? Just ask Aimo Koivunen

fascist-leaning (small f) ideology has an obsession about their own unique concept of masculinity, including plenty of pseudo-science. One of the most striking cases is in food, where on the more extreme levels, infamous grifters (who are clearly lie about their own diet) pitch a cure-all “carnivore diet”, or soy avoidance (supposedly increases estrogen; it doesn’t), or raw milk drinking (I’ve heard a report that the NSN partake in this, along with other unlisted diet restriction). But on a lesser level, this filters down into a pseudo-scientific misinterpretation of proteins in fitness communities which has entered into our mainstream shopping experience.

Why Don’t Fascists Eat Vegetables? is a very insightful watch. (The downside is the whole deep-dive is 6 hours long, but even watching sections is insightful)

I also wouldn’t be too surprised if this is just posturing to the public, who may be concerned about of reports about the loosening fitness standards under previous regimes in a desperate attempt to try and boost falling military recruitment. But it’s also obviously related to fascistic ideas of traditional gender, and the scapegoating of not just trans people, but also cis people who just aren’t ‘masculine’ enough (yes, we know, they’re hypocrites, it’s obvious).