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this post was submitted on 16 Jun 2024
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Fedigrow
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One example of comment removal that caught my eye:
Reason: Misinformation
Reason: Misinformation
Not being able to criticize an instance on that instance seems counterproductive to me. You are convincing people that they are right claiming you apply censorship as they are being censored.
One ban example that caught my eye:
Reason: Misinformation / Harassment
That user was later banned.
This comment has a source (The Telegraph, might not be the best, but still). Seems more interesting to keep the comment, show them why they are wrong, so that people reading the whole conversation can see which side is more reasonable, than removing the comment and banning the user altogether.
"We should platform misinformation so we can present both sides"
Fucking what.
Apologia for the USSR's cooperation with the literal fucking Nazis is next level, and that's the example that jumps out for you?
Disclaimer: I am by no mean expert on the matter.
Some threads I found on the matter on the regretted /r/AskHistorians
My point was that posting those kind of links in reply to comments that are suspected to be propaganda could counter their argumentation without having to silence them.
Platforming lies is platforming lies. "But someone further down in the thread refuted it!" doesn't really matter when the entire fucking point of this kind of misinformation is "Repeat a lie loud enough and often enough and people will believe it's true". It's no more worthy of staying on to show 'both sides' than contrasting vaccination with fucking anti-vaxxers.
I see.
On the other side, banning people is encouraging them to create their own echo chambers (lemmy.ml being obviously one from the recent instance bans). I guess different communities will have different stance on moderation strategies, which is the way the Fediverse is supposed to operate.
People need to be free to be how they like. e.g., if a mod is forced to have to read constant Russian (or Chinese, or Israeli, or American, or UK or whatever) propaganda with horribly offensive active disinformation, then likely they will quit being mods. I'm not saying they are holding their efforts hostage to their preferences - but I'm not not saying that either (it is factually accurate if unnecessarily adversarially phrased), just saying that it's the normal default of the world and we would do better to bow to natural principles than to wish and hope that things were not that way.
It is really, REALLY hard to find common middle ground - and sometimes it cannot be done. Echo chambers are a natural result of how people with opposing viewpoints choose not to tolerate one another.
Intolerance is uniquely important, bc being intolerant to intolerance is not the same as generalized intolerance!!! In fact, the opposite is true: anyplace that is even somewhat vaguely neutral towards intolerant behaviors, in general, will quickly become intolerant overall. Imagine a room with screaming toddlers - those who scream loudest get noticed, and the behavior spirals forward feeding off of the other behaviors to become more pronounced, not less so. A space quiet enough to be heard is not normal. Entropy must be fought against if order is desired. There is a balance somewhere between letting toddlers do nothing at all fun, vs. letting them do whatever crosses their minds at any given moment, thus inflicting their tendencies upon others nearby.
Take Chapotraphouse for instance: I would not dream in a million years of trying to shut that place down. Maybe I should? But I don't. That said, neither do I want to go there, and the Fediverse would be a much more welcoming place overall if it would warn people about what goes on inside of it. If they are willing to be fair-minded, they could even contribute towards writing up the content text of such a warning? They should not be solely in charge of that endeavor, ideally, yet neither do I see any legitimate reason to lock them out of such a process?
I don't know how the Fediverse expects to survive when we mix together the equivalent of 4chan and Wikipedia, but don't label any of it, and then try to get people to come and enjoy their time here. Especially with it being so confusing - e.g. was a comment removed by a community mod or an instance admin? (fortunately v0.19.4 looks to entirely solve that latter one, yay dev efforts on that one - they really do so much for us all, for free!:-D)
Note I am not advocating for a common middle ground here - I do not believe such exists (e.g. if someone wants to make fun of me, but I don't want that, why would we presume a "middle ground solution" should be the default?). I am rather advocating for labeling things what they are. Imagine going to a website to watch videos, but some videos are porn and your friends are all prudes, or moreover let's even imagine some are nonconsensual pedophilia - will you send them there? Sending people to Chapotraphouse, or a place that federates with it - crucially: without labeling it - is like that.
Some places on the Fediverse are like porn - they are (/ may be?) fine to exist, but are considered offensive enough to need to be labeled, if we want to reach out to a more common audience (of e.g. non-Arch-Linux users:-). And then yeah, label Lemmy.World as likely to remove content that goes against Western standards? (Except you picked bad examples imho, being community mods rather than instance admins) And do similarly for Lemmy.ml as well - again, hopefully with their own participation in writing up that label?
No. What can be asserted without evidence can be dismissed without evidence.
Asking mods to debunk it if they want to remove it is absurd. It takes more effort to debunk something than the effort it takes to spread lies, so your "neutral" suggestions are basically saying you want tankie propaganda to take over. Bots would just keep posting more and more propaganda and the mods would fall further and further behind.
I think this illustrates the core problem very well. Attacking the character of the poster, and their motivations, rather than the content itself. Is very problematic for open discourse. And that's probably fine at the comment counter comment level. But when we are talking about banning people the bar should be higher than ad hominem
You want to explain to me how historical misinformation is just an 'ad hominem'?
Like, at the fucking core, that is objectionable content.
I don't particularly care to debate world war II politics, but I think there is enough data there to have a discussion, rather than questioning somebody's character for even bringing it up. I don't actually care about community level moderation decisions, I only care about instance level bans.
Banning somebody from an instance for referring to historical events, seems questionable for a cornerstone Lemmy instance to do. And that is a valid discussion to have here.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Molotov%E2%80%93Ribbentrop_Pact
Yet here you are. Funny way of not particularly caring.
Oh, cool, as long as it's Just Asking Questions(tm) it's okay. Next up, we'll do "Was Hitler REALLY a BAD guy?" and "Did the Holocaust REALLY kill millions of people?"
"Referring to historical events"
By calling the Soviet invasion of Poland 'bloodless' and accusing the Poles of being the REAL Nazis, who the Soviets had to invade to defeat fascism?
Yeah, that's not 'referring to historical events', that's 'referring to pure fucking fantasy and passing it off as historical fact'.
It's curious how many times I run into defenders of people like this who insist that they have no skin in the game but still bend over backwards to accommodate the most horrendous views. I must just not be enlightened enough to understand.
Again I'm not going to debate world war II.
The severe issue at hand is banning somebody from an instance, an instance which runs about 30% of all Lemmy traffic, because of a ad hominem attack against their character for having what looks to be a legitimate perhaps misguided discussion in a news community.
But your entire point rests on the idea that these posters engaging in atrocity denial is 'just a disagreement' that should be tolerated. So pretty clearly you are debating WW2, otherwise you wouldn't be defending their right to "Just Ask Questions" about Soviet massacres of the Polish people.
Jesus fucking Christ. Correctly identifying and banning someone for spreading misinformation is 'a ad hominem attack', and genocide denial is just 'legitimate perhaps misguided discussion'.
What a fucking world.
By your logic should we ban all the Zionists in Lemmy.world denying all the dead Palestinians and calling them Hamas. Because there's a lot. The point is, these things become extremely subjective.
EDIT: Just saw that some people said the invasion of Poland was bloodless. Those kinds of comments do sound like straight up misinformation, though, so it's not all subjective lol.
I wouldn't object.
Mr. Jesus,
Removing somebody from a community, is fine and the prerogative of the community moderators. Removing somebody from lemmyworld at the instance, has a massive chilling effect on the entire lemmeverse. These are things that should have different scope, and different magnitude requirements.
If you think somebody was being disingenuous in your community, removing them from the community fine I support you, I don't agree with you, but the fact that you can do that is a legitimate moderation tool available to you. And I think that's correct.
Removing that person from all communities, for what looks like genuine level engagement, I think is a bridge too far, and harms all of Lemmy.
First, the person was only given a community ban, and not even a permanent ban.
Second, people absolutely should feel that spreading genocide denialism isn't kosher on any legitimate instance. If it was an instance ban, I'd be in support of it, in the same way I would support someone playing debatelord games about the fucking Holocaust should get the boot. It doesn't matter even if they do 'genuinely' believe in their genocide denialism, it is not and should not be welcome in any civilized space.
Okay, from my reading I thought it was an instance ban. Then I have no issue at all here. Carry on
The first two are sweeping generalizations that are like that simply not true and only serve to attack the work of the moderators. If you want to critizise something you need concrete examples.
The last one... the historical accuracy is debatable, but was it even posted on a thread that discussed pre-ww2 history? Usually such cut&paste comments are made to derail justified complaints regarding ML propaganda about recent events.
Ironically, the moderators created those examples themselves by removing those comments.
It was not, but as you know, the lemmy.ml moderation discussion always brings up political questions.
Indeed. The fact that lemmy.ml bans people about mentioning Tienanmen is still crazy. But that should probably not be a justification for lemmy.world moderators to remove any debatable historical thesis and ban users for that, especially on a community dedicated to the fediverse.
Jesus fucking Christ, the users in question are outright denying massacres, a matter of historical fact not seriously questioned by mainstream academia, performed by a totalitarian state in WW2 on a civilian population, but it's okay because the totalitarian state isn't Nazi Germany? It's just a 'debatable historical thesis'?
This is fucked, and it's extremely strange that you don't see that.
The debatable part is that the USSR might have considered it a valid tactic to buy time, which is the main thesis of the specific post quoted above. I think it is a postwar rationalisation and Stalin had no qualms about working with Hitler, but that is also debatable.
What however isn't debatable is that community moderators can and should remove comments that are only made to derail discussions.
Indeed, thanks for pointing it out.
I read the whole chain of comments, it actually was started by another commenter that mentioned Poland, and then started the whole thing. You can have a look here if you are interested: https://slrpnk.net/post/10244872/9112924
I 100% agree with removing the historical revisionism.
I don't quite agree with banning the first two comments. But I do agree they are misinformation. Unless we can surface mod logs about historical facts the mods/instance admins don't like getting people banned from .world?
I'm with you on choosing a smaller instance, though. I moved to .world after I mistakenly had an account on .ml, so I was still pretty new to Lemmy.
This gets back to the original point made in that thread: I chose to move because I had been banned for I don't even know what. Meanwhile the other person was expressing that any amount of collateral damage to minorities is justified as long as he can see white "crackers" suffer and be killed under a Trump authoritarian government.
"You don't understand!! The USSR was allied with the Nazis because they were fighting the Nazis!!!"
I've seen you post a lot of fantastic stuff on here and appreciate the good changes you're actively bringing to the Fediverse, but I have to disagree on this one.
What was wrong with the post specifically? It all looks true and sourced to me. A non aggression pact is not the same as being allies with the Nazis unless you think Sweden, Switzerland, and the US were allied with the Nazis, too, for a time. The USSR needed time to build up their forces and get a buffer zone since the people they wanted to ally with refused to fight the enemy they were scared of, an enemy they had to prepare for.
It's ridiculous, on its face. They wanted a "buffer zone?" So that gave them the right to violently invade people's countries? Justified the next half century of murder and torture after the Nazis were defeated? Come on.
Regarding the non-aggression pact, if they were scared of the Nazis they would have fought them while the Allies fought them. Hitler broke the Ribbentrop Pact, not the USSR. More revisionism propaganda.
They did both of those things because the Kremlin is a violent imperial power that has put many millions of innocent people under the ground, with or without the facade of communism. The gulag isn't just a meme, and there are good reasons their neighbors hate them.
I don't think it gives them right, nor do I think it was the right thing to do, but it does explain it from a real politik point of view, especially after being left alone by western countries. Countries do similar stuff all the time, and I think it's more morally justifiable than the US extending their reach by bombing the hell out of Cuba, Vietnam, Korea, Cambodia, most of South America, etc. They can't even justify those things with self-defense.
They didn't attack at the same time because they were weren't strong enough yet and knew it. I thought that other comment already established that. It makes sense. It would explain why Hitler pushed so far into the USSR on their military campaign. Entering a war is a hard thing to justify for people at home. It's easier when you are provoked. Hell, the US didn't start attacking with their troops at the same time, either, for the same reason. They had to wait until Pearl Harbor. In fact, didn't they even officially enter even later?
The USSR had some major problems, but the issue I have noticed is that people always talk as if the USSR is some extra ordinary evil empire, but when you look at everything, it's not too much worse than the US. The US also had prison labor camps with a vast amount of people in it, except it had a racial component. They also had a huge, surveillance state (just ask MLK, Jr, or Fred Hampton). They also had internal purges (see Hollywood). They also deployed troops and bombs around the world, spreading murder and torture, in an imperialist fashion. The only thing is they don't have to worry about being invaded, so they don't have to make those same kinds of decisions with the fear of the safety of their citizens close to home. And yet no one talks about the US with the same vitriol. I'm kind of appreciating the even handed view of being in the middle of these multiple echo chambers between lemmy.world and like hexbear or lemmygrad lol.
You have a twisted perspective... are you getting your info from YouTube or something?