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submitted 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago) by SpaceCadet@feddit.nl to c/fediverse@lemmy.world

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/linux@some.random.other.instance.world 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.

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[-] neshura@bookwormstory.social 6 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago)

To quote the reason why calling out mods by name is forbidden from a previous encounter I had with them: "removed for doxxing"

So yeah I think you're giving them too much credit here

[-] sudneo@lemm.ee -1 points 5 months ago

I am not sure I understood. You called some mod by name and they removed the comment? If that's the case, I perfectly understand and agree with the decision tbh.

That said, this is a general argument, not referred to any particular mod. I think that many people get angry when their content is moderated and they might want to harass/argue/avenge against the mod who took that action.

[-] neshura@bookwormstory.social 4 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago)

You agree that tagging the username of a mod (wasn't even one it was an admin) is doxxing? If so, you're delusional.

Mod names are visible by default on my instance so if taking a look there and then mentioning the username you see there is doxxing good luck with the rest of your life. You can't have a system where everyone can easily find out who performed a mod action and then claim you were "doxxed"

[-] sudneo@lemm.ee 0 points 5 months ago

No sorry, you said name as in the person's name, I did not understand "username".

[-] neshura@bookwormstory.social 4 points 5 months ago

well in this particular case it wouldn't have mattered, I used the username but the admin in question has their clear name set as the display name (which made the whole "doxxing" claim even funnier to me)

this post was submitted on 05 Jun 2024
1109 points (92.1% liked)

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