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.

  • cygon@lemmy.worldEnglish
    634·
    24 days ago

    Thanks for bringing this up, it’s really needed.

    Your example is just one of many I’ve seen. The entire instance seems to be engaged in an opinion shaping campaign where only this gross mix of Western doomerism with Russia/China-glorifying fascism is allowed to thrive.

    I don’t know how to best deal with such indoctrination chambers. Their members become completely divorced from reality and there’s no way to pull them back from the brink because anything you could say to that effect gets moderator-deleted. Yet vice versa, they can freely spread their propaganda and engage in “raids” on other instances.

    • barsquid@lemmy.worldEnglish
      22·
      24 days ago

      I don’t think we can help them. They’re praising the authoritarian state capitalist nation of China as an ideal form of government just because the country lies about being socialist. (The “Chinese characteristics” are billionaires and capitalism.) They need cult deprogramming to re-enter reality. Just like the Trumpanzees who think Donald did a good job.

      For the rest of us, a team should fork the code and the rest of us cut them loose. I came to Lemmy to get away from delusional far-right redditors. I don’t want to read similar idiotic doublethink from “communists” who love capitalism and think North Korea has done nothing wrong.

      • PrettyFlyForAFatGuyEnglish
        52·
        24 days ago

        You don’t need to do a full lemmy code fork ffs. The problem is moderation style of a specific instance, just set up a new instance and defed from the problem instances.

        • barsquid@lemmy.worldEnglish
          71·
          24 days ago

          If we don’t trust them to moderate instances with integrity I don’t know why we would trust them to maintain the source indefinitely. We’ll eventually have to fork even if it doesn’t seem necessary at the moment.

          • PrettyFlyForAFatGuyEnglish
            91·
            24 days ago

            you can’t trust anyone to maintain source indefinitely. forking now just means everything has to be done twice

    • niktemadur@lemmy.worldEnglish
      221·
      24 days ago

      The entire instance seems to be engaged in an opinion shaping campaign

      That’s too subtle a statement. It is a willful, bad-faith, full-on attack on objective reality via the rewriting of historical facts, redaction of massive volumes of information and constant aggressive, knee-jerk silencing of voices.

      As such, it can also be described as a malicious assault on the mental health of individuals and society as a whole. Their actions a clear example of the type of repressive, miserable society they would have us live in, if given the chance by hook or by crook.

    • Schadrach@lemmy.sdf.orgEnglish
      31·
      24 days ago

      I don’t know how to best deal with such indoctrination chambers. Their members become completely divorced from reality and there’s no way to pull them back from the brink because anything you could say to that effect gets moderator-deleted. Yet vice versa, they can freely spread their propaganda and engage in “raids” on other instances.

      This is essentially the same problem Reddit has (mods/admins can control what is discussed on their boards), stems from the same place (mods/admins have essentially unlimited power over their boards/instances), and has the same basic solution - let the echo chamber echo chamber and create alternative communities that don’t have that problem. And on the upside, since this is a federated space you can just have whatever@otherserver.net instead of r/truewhatever7alpha.

      It’s just more noticeable here because the censorious leftward fringe is both more extreme and more aggressive about it.

      At least we haven’t started getting mods running bots to auto-ban anyone who has ever interacted with other specific communities yet.