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.

  • @Linkerbaan
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    -296 months ago

    Lemmy.world heavily censors criticism of israel over at /politics and /news

    .ml is far less tankie than .world.

      • @Linkerbaan
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        6 months ago

        A person so brainwashed by their government that they will deny war crimes from said government and actively participate in censoring and lying about them in order to spread propaganda.

        • 🦄🦄🦄
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          56 months ago

          Do you think you maybe missed an important classification there? Do you think Hitlers followers were Tankies?

          • @Linkerbaan
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            6 months ago

            Of course not. Nazis are rather honest about their intentions. You don’t hear Nazis saying “No actually we didn’t kill ze Jews, we really like them very much”. If a Nazi supporter would actually say that previous sentence I would classify them as a Tankie.

            The original definition is used to “distinguish party members who spoke out in defense of the Soviet use of tanks to suppress the Hungarian Revolution of 1956 and the 1968 Prague Spring”

            So you can try to deny it being about supporting war crimes by slapping on more labels but that would just backfire as CCP posters suddenly aren’t tankies anymore.

            • 🦄🦄🦄
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              36 months ago

              Of course not. Nazis are rather honest about their intentions. You don’t hear Nazis saying “No actually we didn’t kill ze Jews, we really like them very much”.

              Riiight, that’s why it is necessary for the denial of the Holocaust to be a serious criminal offense in Germany, cause Nazis totally don’t deny it happened.

              You don’t seem to be intelectually honest in this at all, so bye.

              • @Linkerbaan
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                -46 months ago

                Right, try to deflect to strawman and dip. If you can’t even tell the difference between a Neo Nazi and a Nazi then don’t bring it up.

    • @[email protected]
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      86 months ago

      Linkerbaan spreading more lies. Glad I have you tagged as “shill” so it’s easy to recognize you.

      • @takeheart
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        26 months ago

        How do you tag another user? Did you just mean you left a mental note or is it possible to assign custom tags to users somehow?

        • @[email protected]
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          26 months ago

          I use two apps to access Lemmy and both allow me to save notes/tag users. Maybe if you click their username you’ll see the option.

          If you see accounts pushing agendas, you can tag with a note about their bias.

      • @Linkerbaan
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        6 months ago

        At the start of the Genocide debunking any israeli lie was absolutely forbidden over at /world. Muh beheaded babies. Muh mass rapes. Oh wait you still can’t mention that israel lied about the mass rapes because israel themselves hasn’t admitted they lied about it yet. Despite the overwhelming evidence that israel lied about it. If you do you get permabanned for “antisemitism”.

        MBFC only by the way, gotta make sure the site says that UNRWA = Hamas to be reliable!

        The place is ran by Liberal Zionists.