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
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.
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:
It’s pro-authoritarian. That means this control is not really a contradiction. They say they’re leftist, but I think it’d be hard to actually justify that based on the groups they support. Russia isn’t leftist. The USSR may have been, but it’s long gone. Russia is anti-LGBT+ and doesn’t protect workers. It’s an oligarchy.
There are only two consistent things they follow. They’re pro-authoritarian and anti-west.
404 not found
Here let me help
Images barely working, ascii art, threaded structure, federation…
close enough, welcome back usenet.
Thanks. I still have no idea what I’m looking at though. A left-right scale of some kind - is it just randomly drawn lines in the classic political compass?
It is labeled “stethoscope theory” and the image is just regular horseshoe theory, but with “far left” replaced by Tankies and moved to its own special branch that continues off to the left instead of circling back around.
Thank you! That at least gave me enough context to find this image (let’s see if it works)
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.
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
It’s a rite of passage here 😁
imagine you mentioned the tianamin massacre, it would get thier panties in a wad.
They’ve always done this. “Rule 1” Is pretty much a .ml meme catch all for “you aren’t allowed to use facts here. Agree or be removed”
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.
This. Just imagine if all of Lemmy was like one instance or another. The whole point of the fediverse is that there can be multiple instances, and you can just gravitate towards the ones that align with your own views.
Except it would be nice if the instances were honest about their rules, or at least that they would be described somewhere written down, rather than people having to continually find out the hard way (such as OP).
The only thing that bugs me about it is that the largest instances can control what most people see.
True. It’s definitely not a perfect, problem-solved thing. Merely an (significant?) improvement from the corporate status quo.
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.
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
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:
That is why I put “tankie” in quotes.
Lol the admins for .ml are %100 tankies, calling them Marxist-leninists is just a kinder term for “western children who excuse the authoritarian actions of dictators they agree with”. Trying to change history because it doesn’t put russia or china in a good light or trying to call the shit they do as “western propaganda” is just being a tankie.
End of the day, you tankies want to be the ones sending others to the gulags and think you’d be in power in your coming revolution. To bad you’re a microscopic portion of the population that agrees with you and your authoritarian logic.
You’re just the “left” wing version of maga, ignorant and will excuse your dear leaders of any wrong doing while sticking your fingers in your ears shouting fake news.
Im glad youre taking the steps to enjoy lemmy your way. Take care stranger.