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. 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” (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 of the instance looks like:

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 that I had ever participated in.

Proof:

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, 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 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 hosted communities in favor of communities on more reasonable instances.

  • asret@lemmy.zip
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    5 months ago

    Perhaps I don’t really understand - looking at the world news community on lemmy.ml rule 1 seems to be about only posting links to news articles. None of the things on the mod log screenshot look like news articles. Isn’t this the mods doing their jobs correctly?

    The OP’s situation seems completely different to this and it’s definitely a problem - what am I missing about the rule 1 stuff though?

    • wahming@lemmy.world
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      5 months ago

      It’s not the community mods abusing their power, it’s the admins of .ml. Their rule #1 is ‘no bigotry’, which sounds nice but gets interpreted in very… creative ways.

      • asret@lemmy.zip
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        5 months ago

        Thanks!

        I missed the site wide rules.

        Yeah, that sort of rule requires a lot of faith in the moderators. Seems like they’re probably violating it themselves with their moderation.

    • JimSamtanko@lemm.ee
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      5 months ago

      “Rule 1” is a vague rule that allows them to delete anything they want. It’s a well-known thing they do there. They don’t even deny it.