I feel like we need to talk about Lemmy’s massive tankie censorship problem. A lot of popular lemmy communities are hosted on lemmy.ml. It’s been well known for a while that the admins/mods of that instance have, let’s say, rather extremist and onesided political views. In short, they’re what’s colloquially referred to as tankies. This wouldn’t be much of an issue if they didn’t regularly abuse their admin/mod status to censor and silence people who dissent with their political beliefs and for example, post things critical of China, Russia, the USSR, socialism, …
As an example, there was a thread today about the anniversary of the Tiananmen Massacre. When I was reading it, there were mostly posts critical of China in the thread and some whataboutist/denialist replies critical of the USA and the west. In terms of votes, the posts critical of China were definitely getting the most support.
I posted a comment in this thread linking to “https://archive.ph/2020.07.12-074312/https://imgur.com/a/AIIbbPs” (WARNING: graphical content), which describes aspects of the atrocities that aren’t widely known even in the West, and supporting evidence. My comment was promptly removed for violating the “Be nice and civil” rule. When I looked back at the thread, I noticed that all posts critical of China had been removed while the whataboutist and denialist comments were left in place.
This is what the modlog of the instance looks like:
Definitely a trend there wouldn’t you say?
When I called them out on their one sided censorship, with a screenshot of the modlog above, I promptly received a community ban on all communities on lemmy.ml that I had ever participated in.
Proof:
So many of you will now probably think something like: “So what, it’s the fediverse, you can use another instance.”
The problem with this reasoning is that many of the popular communities are actually on lemmy.ml, and they’re not so easy to replace. I mean, in terms of content and engagement lemmy is already a pretty small place as it is. So it’s rather pointless sitting for example in /c/[email protected] where there’s nobody to discuss anything with.
I’m not sure if there’s a solution here, but I’d like to urge people to avoid lemmy.ml hosted communities in favor of communities on more reasonable instances.
Fuck China’s and Fuck Russia’s elite.
That said, reasonable is in the eye of the beholder, and I see capitalism’s apologists at this late hour (I’m suffering a reckless capitalist growth/metastasis caused heat dome as we speak along with 10s of millions of other Americans) as just as unreasonable as you see socialism proponents.
Modding abuse destroys communities, and that’s wrong. But I don’t demand all the communities I frequent spend their days agreeing with me, nor do I walk away unless the entire ethos/subject of the sub is to be against what I’m for. By that I mean, I can generally enjoy talking about a movie, for example, with a capitalism proponent because it isn’t generally centrally relevant to the topic.
The point of discourse is discourse. An AI chatbot will be better at feeding one’s confirmation bias than any community made up of people ever can be.
It’s one thing to believe in and promote a particular political or economic system. The censorship found on instances like Lemmy.ml is an entirely different topic. It hurts the fediverse to have people banned from some of the larger communities for nothing other than wrongthink.
I was banned from the LW comics sub because there was a comic about climate change being real, and I said something along the lines of having far more sympathy for non-human life suffering the hostile climate we’re creating because we’re doing it eyes wide open out of reckless greed , which according to that mod is “ecofascist rhetoric,” which I thought was funny because I wasn’t advocating doing… anything. Saying our species is more culpable for climate change than the other animals also suffering it was wrongthink that day.
That’s the paradox of power in any form, the vast majority who pursue it, from politicians, to police, to mods, usually sought that power with a biased agenda, maybe not even consciously, but still. Power corrupts, bans for wrongthink aren’t avoidable with people in charge and no additional layers of active monitoring/auditing which isn’t really tenable on a volunteer basis.
Your memory is spotty, you were banned from [email protected] for that comment. I will say good job though, I’ll have to add “ecofascist” to my rapidly growing list of wrongthink euphemisms.
My memory is fine, this isn’t the same account.
I know, it was AllonzeeLV, right? I inferred it was you based on the comment summary you gave and similarity to your newer account handle
That’s another account I have yes, but not the one I was referring to.
Ok, well that one was banned from .ml with the same exact reason for the same kind of comment you said got you banned from LW.
I freely admit I’m a broken record on the topics I’m passionate about. Man-made climate change being one of them.
My post history on all my accounts is testament to this.