Ahoy mateys!
A few of our users have recently pointed out that a lot of the pro-Zionist accounts on the fediverse nowadays seem to come from the feddit.org instance.
Feddit.org's explanation for this situation seems to fit into a few common variations:
- They accept both pro- and anti-Zionist members, so it's not proof of a bias.
- They [choose to] comply [in advance] with strict German / Swiss / Austrian laws regarding [overly broad] "antisemitic" language, or they might get in trouble.
- Calling for the destruction of Israel must obviously mean you want to kill every last man, woman and child, rather than simply wanting to overthrow Netanyahu's genocidal fascist regime. Because [bad faith] reasons.
- Lots of Euros (and Germans specifically) are pro-Zionist, so they feel like they have to accommodate this view.
But whatever the excuse happens to be, they need to do better imo. Israel is currently the most violent, fascist and genocidal nation state in the Middle East (if you exclude the US military bases there). And yet feddit.org seems to regard the Palestinians fighting against Israel's ongoing illegal occupation of their land as the real terrorists. As such, I am calling for feddit.org to:
- Explicitly prohibit pro-Zionist accounts from joining.
- Take measures to resolve their claimed legal issues, e.g., moving their server location to a less regulated jurisdiction, and ensuring that admin accounts remain anonymous regarding their location.
- Stop referring to folks who call for "Death to Israel" or similar as though they are the terrorists or violent extremists. The Zionist Israeli settlers, the murderous IDF rapists, and the entirety of the Israeli government are clearly the violent ethnostate extremists we should be worried about, not the Palestinians in Gaza who are fighting for their lives every single day against completely disproportionate levels of Zionist violence.
More context
Our instance already voted to ban pro-Zionist accounts (see https://lemmy.dbzer0.com/post/60585441 for reference) and the rule that was implemented is here: Golden Rule #8.
As further context, you can find relevant comments and discussion in this post by a banned feddit admin in MoG (that fact they chose to post in MoG is in itself quite telling), and this post about their defederation from quokk.au over anti-semitism allegations has recently become active again.
I've also pulled out some choice morsels from the modlog to illustrate the sort of thing we are talking about:
This one says it all... mrdown@lemmy.world being banned for calling out feddit.org users for being Zionist apologists. It's apparently "xenophobic" to state a few hard truths.
If you have had similar experiences on feddit.org, please feel free to share in the comments.
Voting instructions
I am proposing to ban the following communities from feddit.org, which seem to be the most problematic communities in terms of hosting pro-Zionist posts/comments:
- https://feddit.org/c/YUROP
- https://feddit.org/c/europe
- https://feddit.org/c/buyfromeu
- https://feddit.org/c/europa
- https://feddit.org/c/dach
- https://feddit.org/c/deutschland
- https://feddit.org/c/germany
Upvote this post if you want dbzer0 / anarchist nexus to ban these communities.
Downvote this post if you'd prefer not to ban these communities.
Note 1: Votes from external instances do not count, unless one of our admins has vouched for you.
Note 2: If you think feddit.org deserves a full instance ban instead, or have alternative suggestions, then please leave your comments below. If enough people think that's the better option, then we'll do that instead.
Note 3: Although I don't really expect this to happen, if feddit.org agrees to make policy changes to address these issues then we are willing to reassess the situation.
Just yesterday I had an odd interaction with an .ml user who reposted a straight-up nazi tweet, by a nazi profile, even with their own thread title resembling a frequent nazi dogwhistle. Several non-.ml users, apparently mostly from feddit, pointed out the post looks like it was posted by a nazi. .ml users responded in part by attacking their instance allegiance (calling them "whingy fedditers"). Since I posted enough clear evidence of the Twitter profile being a fascist, OP commendably deleted their thread.
What I saw there is feddit users being met with a hate boner from .ml and their correct suspicions of a tweet that looks antisemitic indeed being antisemitic being ignored and made light of.
That's my personal experience with feddit and its zionism, and consequently I've ended up suspicious of some of Lemmy users' standards regarding this whole matter.
The examples of feddit moderation posted here in OP are almost entirely sanctions against grave personal attacks. I am completely unconvinced that this is proof of the moderators' zionist positions. "Fuck you, you piece of trash" and "fuck you and your whole family" is not "a few hard truths". I'm also unsure if I get the context right, is mrdown a Palestinian? Many of those comments break the most elementary civility standards and verge into murderous fantasies.
Then say it like that? No, destroying a country is not the same as overthrowing its regime, those are different things. I support the latter with regards to Israel, but would hardly dare say the former.
This post was supposed to convince me feddit's behaviour is problematic. I come away with the opposite impression. So, I vote against the bans.
You defending feddit.org against for their clear examples of Zionism really drives home what I already suspected.
I'm going to repeat it here: there was nothing wrong with the Tweet itself and there's no relation to any dogwhistling. I have solely deleted it because it was posted by a neo-Nazi account, as you pointed out to me.
All of the feddit.org criticism came from "Israel = Jews and therefore making a generalizing claim about Israelis = antisemitic".
Here's the Tweet without the neo-Nazi's handle for reference.
Not commenting on the rest, but the Tweet itself doesn't show anything genocidal.
It does clearly show that the current CEO of Discord is attempting to clearly identify Discord users and that the Israeli govt might have a hand in it, as they could be a potential buyer of the data.
Nobody said it's genocidal.
Have you ever been to 4chan?
Maybe I have the wrong definition of "Nazi"?
Maybe. I don't remember if I did.
Nazis aren't defined or recognised just by open calls for genocide. Building suspicion of and hatred of Jews is also a commonplace activity.
That makes sense, because if you did the tweet would be a red flag.