We, the admin team, decry all forms of settler-colonialism, and we recognize that Zionism is a pro-settler-colonialist position.
Therefore we propose that should no longer be accepting of any Zionist accounts on our instances.
Please upvote for agree, downvote for disagree.
Note: we only count votes by instance members of dbzer0 and anarchist.nexus, plus a few vouched-for external users.
Hi mateys, I've kept things simple in the above text, for brevity, but in fact it took the admin team quite a while to get to this stage. We have discussed the policy change extensively, and a variety of different perspectives emerged. I will attempt to sum them up below as best I can:
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The "this isn't that complicated" school of thought goes something like this: If someone is consistently posting comments that mirror Hasbara talking points (e.g. justifying the genocide in Gaza, consistently painting Palestinians as terrorists and Israel as the victim), then they should be instance banned. It's just not acceptable for Zionists to be allowed on our instances.
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The "slippery slope" / "purity test" school of thought is that banning people for having an "unpopular" political opinion would potentially mean banning half the fediverse, if more and more of these policies were enacted over time. To attempt to mitigate this we are keeping the scope of this rule as narrow as possible, and I also don't think many of our users will be affected. Also, we typically don't have frequent policy changes, and I have no reason to expect that to change moving forward.
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Another important discussion point was "how do we decide whether someone is pro-Zionist or not?" We can't always be 100% sure of someone's true intentions, we can only go on what they have posted and that is subject to interpretation. I don't feel there is an easy answer to this one, except to say that we would have to be pretty certain before issuing a perma-ban.
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The "geopolitics don't matter" school of thought is that trying to be on the "correct" side of every issue is kind of pointless because nothing that happens in lemmy chat forums will ever make an ounce of difference in the real world. Don't bother moderating users over political/ideological differences, just let people argue if they want. While I can totally empathize with this sentiment, I can also see the case for taking a clear stance on this topic in accordance with our values and the overwhelming support for the Palestinian cause among our users. Personally, I am advocating in favor of the resolution.
Please add your comments below if you want to provide your own thoughts on the topic, or have any questions.
expiry: 7
I'm not who you were talking with, but this place was founded and is run with pretty narrow and consistent ideals. And governance is not hierarchical (in practice). Slippery slope is much less a concern here than most places.
And with that in mind, the hand-wringing you're describing just isn't merited and feels vulgar. Fuck Zionism and anything that sounds even barely related, there is a genocide happening. Boo fucking hoo if people don't get to discuss wanting some magic utopia that sure sounds like the exact goddamn argument that got us all here.
Setting aside the barren state of historical precedent for the following, why is "special Zionism that totally doesn't include any violence and is just nice!" an idea that's so important we need to hinder our own efforts to block the propaganda whitewashing genocide? It's a bad premise.
Intelligent people can have meaningful discussions about the best way to structure administrative policies without it having anything to with hand wringing or support of a genocidal state.
Fuck Israel. Fuck zionism. Fuck the people supporting this genocide.
Clear enough for you?
I still think rules should be created in their best possible form. It avoids confusion and unnecessary conflict, and sets a clear precedent for other issues in the future. That shouldn't be a controversial stance.
Yeah, no argument from me that rules should be clear and care should be taken to define them.
But I think the combo of wide discretion + transparency about mod actions will serve us much better than trying to narrowly carve out exactly what's prohibited.
If we think of rules as modeling reality, it makes it easy to discuss the concepts in terms of classic modeling tradeoffs. In this case overly precise rules are like over-fitting the model, which can be expected to cause false negatives - Zionist content getting through. An under-fit model (overly broad rules) is expected to produce more false positives - bans for content that only overlaps with Zionist content.
We know that powerful motivated entities want to cause false negatives wherever they can, and that genocide is the aim of such action.
On the other hand, what is the impact and expected frequency of false positives? How many people are going to be mistakenly banned (there is not a military industrial force driving such discussion...) and what are the consequences of banning people like that? And then add in, which has the higher mod burden, wide discretion or precise definitions?
Devil is in the details of course and maybe we agree more closely than warrants this discussion, but as with all modeling we are forced to decide which kind of "wrong model" we want to land on. For me it's a very easy decision, particularly here (both this topic and this instance).
(Edit - since that got wordy - basically it sounds to me like you're saying "just make the model less wrong" where I'm saying "that only works to a point, we need to decide what kind of wrong we want it to be")