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Evidence that lemmy.ml weaponizes rule 1 to censor criticism of russia and china (lemmy.world)

submitted 3 days ago* (last edited 3 days ago) by lithiumground@lemmy.world to c/fediverse@lemmy.world

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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

Log screenshots

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[-] XiJinpingStanAccount@lemmy.ml 18 points 3 days ago* (last edited 3 days ago)

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.)

What is lemmy.ml?

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).

[-] TORFdot0@lemmy.world 5 points 2 days ago

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)

[-] selokichtli@lemmy.ml 7 points 2 days ago

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.

[-] no_name_dev_from_hell@programming.dev 2 points 2 days ago

Anyone who uses "tankies" unironically is a braindead basement dweller keyboard warrior who has zero critical thinking skills.

[-] XiJinpingStanAccount@lemmy.ml 9 points 2 days ago

Why is it a problem? Literally every single major social media platform has an ideological slant. Twitter (X) is the nazi one, reddit is the like omega liberal vote blue no matter who one, facebook is mindless reaction, etc. If lemmy.world was considered the "default" instance I could say the same thing about it being different than my own political beliefs.

I think the problem is that people can't handle seeing places they aren't welcome anymore. Marxist-Leninists are allowed to have their own spaces, and do not have to cater to other peoples views. There is ALWAYS going to be a dominant ideology and a set of rules on each instance. You don't agree with the ones lemmy.ml has. That's okay.

Algorithmic social media silos people into their little boxes where they only see what they want to see. People are so used to that now that imo they've forgotten how to handle being faced with a place/group of people who just fundamentally disagree with them, and are not open to hearing what they have to say. Yet that is just reality. People need to learn to deal the fact those places and those people exist.

[-] Devial@lemmy.world 0 points 3 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago)

Supporting the heavily anti LGBTQ imperialist state of Russia is not liberal.

Anyone who supports Russia is explicitly anti LGBTQ. You cannot be pro LGBTQ whilst supporting and defending a fascist government that treads on LGBTQ rights.

Neither is it liberal to claim that supporting the existence of Jews, whilst explicitly denouncing the genocide state of israel is a "zionist stance", which geneve_convenience, the mod mentioned in this post literally verbatim did, and then banned someone over.

Super liberal, basically stating that Jews as a people, regardless of any individuals opinion, don't deserve to exist, just because many of them are zionist. By that logic members of every major religion, as well as every single cis white male don't deserve the right to exist as a people.