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.

        • @[email protected]English
          4•6 months ago

          Look, I’d love to discuss, but usually with this kind of bigotry it amounts to pissing in a violin. There’s no room for hate in my world

        • @[email protected]English
          4•6 months ago

          You’re free to talk all you like, in fact -but you’re going to be rightfully considered a dipshit. It comes with the territory. Be prepared, my fragile friend.

    • @assassin_aragornEnglish
      6•6 months ago

      Yeah it was only a matter of time before you explicitly lumped Indians into the persona non grata list. I always knew you guys would eventually just say “fuck all brown people”. This is exactly why Indians born in the West to Indian immigrants have strong solidarity with other brown people regardless of their religion. We don’t trust you conservatives and never will.

      You came invaded our ancestral country, subjugated us, stole our natural resources, and divided us. You still have items you stole from us in your museums. And you have the audacity to say that Indians and Muslims are invading Europe after Europe invaded us and stole from us.

      Naw. This is why we’re on the left. Fuck you all. If you say we’re invading you, then fuck it. We are invading you, and we’ve raised “anchor babies” as sleeper cell spies – and we’re going to save the West from you pathetic conservative colonizers.

      • @[email protected]English
        4•6 months ago

        I’d like to note for the record that I downvoted you not for using the term “racist”, that definitely seems to be an accurate assessment, but for saying “European”. For one, a European racist wouldn’t care about Canada, for two, Indians aren’t really a large or noticeable or denigrated immigrant group anywhere in Europe but maybe the UK, and for three, UK racists wouldn’t care about “the continent”.

        No, what we’re looking at here seems to be a Canadian racist. They can keep them.