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.
Use communities on lemm.ee which will have both left and right wing folk. Or if you want to avoid left altogether, Lemmy.world communities, and there are lots of them.
Lemm.ee is something we need to nurture. Great admins that try to avoid their personal biases.
tankies are not “left”. they’re basically fascists with a leftist paint job. they use some left-related words to propagate right-wing views.
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yeah, which is why i didn’t say communists. I said tankies.
Left wing doesnt mean good. It just means left wing. Mao and Stalin were left wing.
Right wing doesnt mean bad. It just means right wing. Your average blue collar worker is right wing.
No tankies are authotarian left to be exact the term tankie is refering to those who believe in authotarian socialism (communism) they advocate for authotarian left wing policy’s . And conservative views such as family values rule of law property rights populism (caring about the wants and needs of the every day man) aren’t fascist opinions.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tankie?wprov=sfla1
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conservatism?wprov=sfla1
https://www.dictionary.com/browse/populism
Noun British
a political strategy based on a calculated appeal to the interests or prejudices of ordinary people
first of all i didn’t talk about conservatism so that part is irrelevant… second of all, it doesn’t matter what anyone calls it, but “authoritarian socialism/communism” is an oxymoron; which is fitting because tankie ideology is nonsensical just like fascism.
when it comes down to it, the left wing is against social hierarchy and right wing is for it. “authoritarian left” doesn’t make sense; it’s just a way to refer to nonsense like tankie ideology… right wing ideology wrapped in leftist language.
Sorry, I can’t stand tankies, but tankies are still a lot more rational than the average US conservative these days. Conservative opinions should be censored and don’t need a voice on this platform. “Everyone should have a voice, no matter how destructive and irrational” is its own extreme opinion.