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 [http://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
[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
[https://lemmy.ml/modlog] of the instance looks like:
[https://feddit.nl/pictrs/image/6886b092-43d3-408b-ab57-2fa686f8a6c7.png]
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 [http://lemmy.ml] that I had ever
participated in. Proof:
[https://feddit.nl/pictrs/image/9c52e470-645f-46ba-ac1d-0b7d8be17af3.png] 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 [http://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
[/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 [http://lemmy.ml] hosted communities in favor of
communities on more reasonable instances.
Lemmy.ml, like lemmygrad.ml and hexbear.net, has consistently been accused of improper Federation practices and many instances have decided to ban one or both of the latter by default, with many individual users having already gone further to block the former as well. However, many individual users on lemmy.ml seem unaware of the accusations of the practices of their admins, and some people go so far as to see lemmy.ml as a sort of default instance on the Fediverse.
This discussion promotes wider knowledge of the situation and what might be done about it in the future, in order to e.g. not turn away new potential Federation members (Fedizens?:-) that could otherwise associate what happens on that instance as something relating to the Fediverse as a whole.
I would put it differently, I think: all ideologies can become amplified, but they do not necessarily have to be. I tend to find that people of character can discourse on anything at all, whereas people lacking character cannot discourse on much if anything without it devolving into a fight - for the latter, fighting is the point, not a(n unfortunate) by-product of the discussion topic at hand. For people whose ultimate end-goal is Truth, then what idea could possibly be a “cancer”? Though for people whose goal is rather Control, every dissenting opinion must be rooted out & destroyed. But I would say that it is not “facts” that are the deadly things, and rather “attitudes”, like whether someone values Truth vs. Control. I hope that makes some semblance of sense:-P.
Also, there’s a difference between labelling something and censoring it. You getting banned is an example of the latter, whereas e.g. X’s adding a note that “this post may contain misinformation” would be the former. In movies, labelling porn as X or XXX or whatever, and more “adult” movies as R, “young teenager” movies as PG-13, child aka “general audience” movies as G, allows people to pick and choose what they want (though e.g. to get into a PG-13 movie, someone younger than 13 needs an adult present). But then when you have people arguing not about facts but which authoritarian viewpoint is going to be force-fed to the masses, neither labelling nor censoring is going to be possible in a manner to please both sides, b/c the truth cannot be agreed upon first, nor even THAT the truth should matter at all in the first place.
Some places, like Wikipedia put in ENORMOUS investments of effort (time, attention, real WORK) to getting something that everyone can more or less agree upon. e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Donald_Trump says not that “he’s totally innocent, framed I tell ya!” nor “he’s guilty as sin and should be shot”, but the bare-bones facts that:
In May 2024, a jury in New York found Trump guilty on 34 felony counts of falsifying business records related to a hush-money payment to Stormy Daniels, making him the only former U.S. president to be convicted of a crime. He has been indicted in three other jurisdictions on 54 other felony counts related to his mishandling of classified documents and efforts to overturn the 2020 presidential election. In separate civil proceedings in New York state court, Trump was found liable for sexual abuse and defamation in 2023 and for financial fraud in 2024.
This will not stop people from interpreting these facts however they wish, but these words do serve the purpose of being recorded in a purely factual manner for the sake of a public record.
Conversely, social media is not worth that amount of attention, so moderators resort to simply censoring it. It’s the nature of the game, which we sign up for by commenting to such a place in the first place. We are entitled to nothing. Though we can comment on our POV from our experiences, and e.g. if we don’t like their admin practices, we can - and should - leave lemmy.ml and move on to better places where we are more free to discuss things among people who care more about facts than authoritarian regimes propped up by censorship of dissenting opinions (and yes, contrarian facts).
But first, we need to acknowledge that it is happening, as we are doing now. And then share that knowledge with others who may be taken unawares, so that they too do not have to go through all the pain that you did, in having to find that out first-hand. :-)
I would put it differently, I think: all ideologies can become amplified, but they do not necessarily have to be. I tend to find that people of character can discourse on anything at all, whereas people lacking character cannot discourse on much if anything without it devolving into a fight - for the latter, fighting is the point, not a(n unfortunate) by-product of the discussion topic at hand. For people whose ultimate end-goal is Truth, then what idea could possibly be a “cancer”? Though for people whose goal is rather Control, every dissenting opinion must be rooted out & destroyed. But I would say that it is not “facts” that are the deadly things, and rather “attitudes”, like whether someone values Truth vs. Control. I hope that makes some semblance of sense:-P.
Also, there’s a difference between labelling something and censoring it. You getting banned is an example of the latter, whereas e.g. X’s adding a note that “this post may contain misinformation” would be the former. In movies, labelling porn as X or XXX or whatever, and more “adult” movies as R, “young teenager” movies as PG-13, child aka “general audience” movies as G, allows people to pick and choose what they want (though e.g. to get into a PG-13 movie, someone younger than 13 needs an adult present). But then when you have people arguing not about facts but which authoritarian viewpoint is going to be force-fed to the masses, neither labelling nor censoring is going to be possible in a manner to please both sides, b/c the truth cannot be agreed upon first, nor even THAT the truth should matter at all in the first place.
Some places, like Wikipedia put in ENORMOUS investments of effort (time, attention, real WORK) to getting something that everyone can more or less agree upon. e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Donald_Trump says not that “he’s totally innocent, framed I tell ya!” nor “he’s guilty as sin and should be shot”, but the bare-bones facts that:
This will not stop people from interpreting these facts however they wish, but these words do serve the purpose of being recorded in a purely factual manner for the sake of a public record.
Conversely, social media is not worth that amount of attention, so moderators resort to simply censoring it. It’s the nature of the game, which we sign up for by commenting to such a place in the first place. We are entitled to nothing. Though we can comment on our POV from our experiences, and e.g. if we don’t like their admin practices, we can - and should - leave lemmy.ml and move on to better places where we are more free to discuss things among people who care more about facts than authoritarian regimes propped up by censorship of dissenting opinions (and yes, contrarian facts).
But first, we need to acknowledge that it is happening, as we are doing now. And then share that knowledge with others who may be taken unawares, so that they too do not have to go through all the pain that you did, in having to find that out first-hand. :-)