The administration of lemmy.ml routinely abuses its rule 1 anti-bigotry policy to conduct political censorship, deleting documented facts regarding the ukraine invasion, holodomor, and xinjiang abuses under false pretexts of imperialist propaganda, misinformation, and nazism while leaving pro-Kremlin talking points untouched.
Verifiable public moderation logs prove this systemic shielding of state propaganda, down to moderators inverting standard geopolitical context, such as noting that fringe extremist units do not make an entire democratic nation fascist, to ban dissenters under the explicit excuse of being a Nazi.
https://lemmy.ml/modlog?page=1&actionType=All&userId=25800386 and https://lemmy.world/modlog/446?page=1&actionType=All&userId=20355358.
The Europe community moderator (https://lemmy.world/u/geneva_convenience@lemmy.ml), who focuses exclusively on criticizing the West and never Russia or China, banned me as a Nazi.
I decided to block the lemmy.ml instance entirely to avoid any further interaction.
I see that there are dozens of relevant posts; you can find the relevant report posts here
- https://lemmy.world/post/16211417
- https://lemmy.world/post/5697017
- https://lemmy.world/post/50302822
- https://lemmy.world/post/13238608
- https://lemmy.world/post/43978041
Log screenshots
The path to enlightenment.
It is so blatantly obvious. Worse than the_donald was on reddit. Pure Chinese and Russia propaganda. Overtly negative on anything from the west and won’t allow anything negative about Russia, China, etc.
💯
“Overtly negative on anything from the West” lol.
Make sure you vote blue no matter who, lol.
How’s the effort to start a communist revolution going?
How’s the genocide going?
Nice pivot
Following your lead.
The mods do whatever they want, many break their own posted rules with regularity.
In my experience, in Lemmy they are more apt to delete a comment then ban, so that is nice.
There’s no logic to it. I’ve said “The nation ___________ says this, their motto is ___________ … (and then repeat their own slogan from their own officials).”
Delete. 100% true, easily verifiable everywhere, public information pertaining to the discussion, deleted.
So, if you’re censored or banned, that just means that you’re a thinking person with reasonable opinions who bases your conclusions on the factual information available to you.
It’s a good thing. Thank God.
If they agree with you, please get help immediately. Time is short.
It’s basically a rite of passage for a new lemmy user to get banned from half of .ml for a completely mundane comment they made.
You must be new around here. This is old news and a reason a lot of places block ml
It’s important to document their behavior anyway, because not al places block ml.
I knew that lemmy.ml is tankies, but removing comments/posts that don’t serve their agenda is new to me.
One of my first experiences in the Fediverse was mentioning the Uyghur genocide and having my comment promptly removed by the .ml admins. They’ve been doing this all the time.
imagine you mentioned the tianamin massacre, it would get thier panties in a wad.
When I first got on here I waded into a thread praising north korea and got so many downvotes for not knowing how awesome the Kim regime is. Fucking tankies man
In large part that is what the word “tankie” means - denial of reality, instead substituting their own, which can only be done inside of a controlled echo chamber. Tankie is no way is synonymous with Communist.
Think MAGA but on the left - it’s otherwise identical in terms of behaviors, merely different talking points.
You may find this illustrative:
You may find this illustrative:
404 not found
Here let me help
Whatever the fuck tankies are -------● doing / / ● Far \ /Right \ / ●----●Center●/ Far Left™
A lot of instances are curated, they’re the supreme mods after all. Some delay your posts until they can curate them, and some just remove them. It’s the way it be.
This isn’t said and understood enough. Instances on the Fediverse aren’t free-for-all, apolitical places without ideology. Some try to be (with varying success) but being active in the Fediverse and especially running an instance is in itself a fairly ideological and political act. So chances are instances reflect their owners’ ideology. And that is great because one has places to be if an instance doesn’t suit them, unlike corpo platdorms where one ideology drives most of them.
The only thing that bugs me about it is that the largest instances can control what most people see.
The great thing about lemmy’s design is that that’s not really true. I’m seeing this criticism of .ml despite being on .ml, because most of the posts that I see on lemmy are not on my home instance. At least half the time, I’m having discussions outside of my “home turf.”
When you have a space that agrees on certain base assumptions, it becomes easier to have more in depth and thoughtful discussions, because you don’t have to focus on just proving or advocating for those basic assumptions over and over again, and watching every word you say to make sure it can’t be twisted or misinterpreted to paint you in a negative light. By contrast, sharing a space with ideological opponents often means people tend to dig in and just make snipes at each other, everybody’s just grandstanding and trying to get owns in, and the level of discussion is brought down to name-calling and accusations.
At the same time, yes, echo chambers are a concern. If you’re never exposed to opposing viewpoints, obviously that’s not great either. We can see that happen on any number of subreddits. And if we were on different subreddits instead of on different instances, I wouldn’t be seeing this criticism, and you wouldn’t be seeing my response to it.
The way the fediverse is designed inherently addresses both of those concerns. You can have a space where the discussions assume a shared ideology allowing for in depth discussions, but then you’re also federated with other spaces with different shared assumptions. The “tankie” creators of lemmy designed it this way on purpose, for that reason. To allow minority views (including but not limited to their own) to have spaces for discussion, without becoming isolated. To allow for higher level discussions with shared assumptions while also allowing for interactions between groups with different assumptions.
This is why all this hand-wringing over .ml’s censorship is kind of silly. Because people on .ml are constantly seeing content from other instances with completely different policies, and that is not in spite of what the .ml’s admins want, they literally designed it that way on purpose.
The only censorship that really matters on the fediverse is defederation.
Why are you writing tankie in quotes?
Because I disagree with the term. The admins are not “tankies,” they are Marxist-Leninists.
What makes someone a “tankie” is that they “defend” certain states. In practice, “defending” often includes just refuting misinformation, for example, if I refute that “everyone in North Korea gets the same haircut” then I’m “defending” it and therefore a “tankie.” It can also mean acknowledging accomplishments, saying any good thing about any socialist state, like, “Cuba had a very successful literacy program,” which is just an objective historical fact. “Tankie” is supposed to mean someone who blindly supports everything a socialist state has ever done, in practice, it means someone who supports anything a socialist state has ever done.
Before it was “tankie” it was “pinko,” and before that “red.” That kind of red scare bullshit has allowed blatant misinformation to run rampant, because even rational people avoid pushing back on it for fear of being labelled a “tankie.” As stories about how all communists eat babies or whatnot run rampant, it has in turn hurt the reputation of both leftists and liberals, because it literally doesn’t matter how hard you try to distance yourself from the far-left, you’ll still get associated with it. Joe Biden got called a communist for Christ’s sake. To put it another way:
Purging the Left of communists became a longstanding practice, having injurious effects on various progressive causes. For instance, in 1949 some twelve unions were ousted from the CIO because they had Reds in their leadership. The purge reduced CIO membership by some 1.7 million and seriously weakened its recruitment drives and political clout. In the late 1940s, to avoid being “smeared” as Reds, Americans for Democratic Action (ADA), a supposedly progressive group, became one of the most vocally anticommunist organizations.
The strategy did not work. ADA and others on the Left were still attacked for being communist or soft on communism by those on the Right. Then and now, many on the Left have failed to realize that those who fight for social change on behalf of the less-privileged elements of society will be Red-baited by conservative elites whether they are communists or not. For ruling interests, it makes little difference whether their wealth and power is challenged by “communist subversives” or “loyal American liberals.” All are lumped together as more or less equally abhorrent.
- Michael Parenti, Blackshirts and Reds
That is why I put “tankie” in quotes.
and those other instances can also moderate and delete comments and posts for all other instances unless archived or crossposted. If a lemmy.world mod deletes a comment in a lemmy.world post, I won’t be able to see it from over here in db0
You do realize admins “on the left” are doing the exact same thing, methodically deleting posts with facts they don’t like? For example /u/little_cow@lemmy.world, which looks like some alt account used specifically to delete comments. Are you going to defederate lemmy.world as well?
I was banned from .world politics for saying Joe Biden accelerated the genocide in Gaza. They specifically banned me until after the election.
There is no unlimited of freedom-speech anywhere in the world.but scale is different. You can’t say Putin is a dictator in Russia, but you can say Trump is a bastard/Dictator in new york.
USA limit less than Russia and Lemmy.ml limit more like russia than USA
Lmao, in the US, you can be deported to a concentration camp in a country you’ve never been to for protesting against your government doing a genocide. You haven’t been paying much attention lately?
Please don’t ever link me to your whining again, thanks.
There needs to be a list of instances that defederate lemmy.ml by default. It’s not just a single community, it is at the admin level.
Be the change you want to see in this world. Make your own instance and defederate.
I mean. You can also just go to their front page and read the “about this instance” paragraph where they clarify that they support a specific political ideology and will not tolerate dissent.
They explicitly built a walled garden. Don’t be surprised they maintain the walls. There are other instances.
Not only that but they explicitly said years ago that they WANTED someone to go make a liberal instance for liberals to use and do their own thing. Which is what happened. Yet people continue to throw a fit that .ml maintains its policies. The entire point of lemmy is that you can choose the instance that works best for you! The entire reason many of the original people came to lemmy was that reddit banned Marxist-Leninist (what you would call “tankie”) communities. And even many just vaguely leftist spaces. So people made their own thing where no one person controls what is allowed and what isn’t. That’s what federation is all about. If you don’t like that there are instances that disagree with you on a fundamental level and ban you for your opinions then you don’t actually understand what the point of federation is to begin with. I mean ML is in the name. What did you expect?
(edit to clarify I’m asking the OP not the commenter I am agreeing with the commenter.)
Recently there seems to be some of misunderstanding what the lemmy.ml instance is about, especially from newer users.
Lemmy.ml has always been a niche site, and it will most likely stay this way. We don’t have any intentions to turn it into a mainstream instance, or set a goal of getting as many users as possible. Our goal is simple: make an instance that people like to use. I would say that we have been successful in this, but obviously it is impossible to satisfy everyone.
The reason for this is that @dessalines and I are paid to develop Lemmy, while donations from lemmy.ml users only make up a negligible part of our income. Besides, having more users would force us to spend more time moderating, and less time for development. Lemmy works quite differently from big tech sites like Reddit in this regard: while they get more money with each extra user through advertising, for us it is the opposite. So we would much rather have a smaller, non-toxic, and friendly userbase, than a large one.
Part of the problem might be that lemmy.ml is described as “flagship instance”, which can certainly be interpreted to mean “mainstream” or “general purpose”. I struggle to come up with a better, more accurate description. If you can think of one, please comment here.
If you dont like the way lemmy.ml works, thats okay. Federation exists exactly to solve that problem, let different groups have their own instances, with their own rules and political views. You can see the list of existing instances, and instructions for setting up a new one on join-lemmy.org.
In particular, I would like to see someone (or a group of people) create a mainstream, or liberal instance. That should help to avoid further drama, and avoid attempts to turn lemmy.ml into something that it is not. @dessalines and I would certainly be willing to help with any technical problems that such an instance runs into, and include it on join-lemmy.org (just like any other instance that meets the code of conduct).
The problem is that it’s the developers’ instance and they promote it as a default general use instance and not a explicit political ideological instance so it has a significant portion of people just trying to join the network.
I would recommend someone looking to join the threadiverse to use piefed over Lemmy for that reason (of course piefed has its own problematic “features” with regards to default mute lists and transparency)
In my experience it’s not an explicit political ideological instance. I’m there all the time and never get called anything because I think this or that, except when I’m outside of ML, where I get “tankie” a lot.
Anyone who uses “tankies” unironically is a braindead basement dweller keyboard warrior who has zero critical thinking skills.
