Today a question about the Israel/Palestine conflict was posted here clearly in favor of the Palestine cause. Many comments were left both in favor of and critical of Hamas. The is not a question about the politics of the actual situation but rather the mods actions around censorship of comments in this community.

From the modlog it is clear as day that the mods removed all comments critical of Hamas from that post. No comments critical of Israel were removed. Furthermore, the reason given was that they were a violation of rule 1. Rule 1 being “No bigotry - including racism, sexism, ableism, homophobia, transphobia, or xenophobia.”

The modlog contains the actual comments if you would like to see them. None of them are inappropriate with regards to rule 1 in any way or deserving to be removed for reasons other than the mods apparently disagree with the point of view they exhibit. The people who posted these comments were banned as well.

If anything, I would assume this post as a whole would be removed according to rule 2 of c/asklemmy:

Not offensive: at this point, we do not have the bandwidth to moderate overtly political discussions. Assume best intent and be excellent to each other.

Yet the post is still up and the mods here seem to have clearly chosen a side and instead opted to censor anything they don’t agree with. Hypocritical much?

Regardless of what you agree with or disagree with on this topic, it should be clear that allowing mods to censor otherwise benign comments expressing a legitimate point of view they may not agree with is not the way to a trustworthy and healthy community. Even if you disagree with these comments on this topic, how long will it be before you find yourself at odds with the mods on something else and have your comments removed and your account banned?

Actions like this completely destroy trust in communities like this and put a platform such as Lemmy which is still attempting to gain its footing on even more shaky ground. If I wanted to deal with powertripping mods I could have stayed on reddit. Shame on you all.

  • TWeaKEnglish
    82·
    10 months ago

    lemmy.ml moderation is one thing, you might expect some of that in the post-hexbear phase of the federation. There’s definitely an overlap in the style of moderation with hexbear, lemmygrad and little bit with lemmy.ml.

    However, for me the bigger concern is how quickly lemmy communities seem to be becoming insular. Presenting new ideas that might go against the grain can be very heavily downvoted (feel free to check my comment history) in such a manner that it seems like people aren’t really reading the comment and objecting to it, but reading the score and piling on.

    If the purpose of public forums is to have a discussion, then open discussion should be more encouraged.

    Edit: End of the day though, a community moderator has full reign to moderate within their community, provided that they adhere to the rules of the instance the community is in. Instance admin have ultimate rulership - you trust the admin as they run the code of the website you load.

    Beyond that, while the community forum is open to everyone, if the community mods don’t like you they have every right to ban you for any reason - if you don’t like it, the solution is to make a new community.

  • MigratingtoLemmy@lemmy.world
    107·
    10 months ago

    Does this mean Lemmy.world mods are going the way of the dumps too? Will this be another Lemmy.ml?

    I will be following this. I do not appreciate such one-sided fervour on a forum such as this

    • TWeaKEnglish
      46·
      10 months ago

      You’re commenting in a lemmy.ml community.

      Calling something “another lemmy.ml” sounds like bullshit, lemmy.ml has always been something of a neutral territory.

    • Grizzly_Biscuit@lemmy.world
      43·
      10 months ago

      Wait to criticize Hamas is supporting terrorism? Can you tie that in somehow for me? I’m not a supporter of how the IDF is dealing with things because of all the civilian casualties in gaza, but I don’t have to support Hamas to have that opinion.

  • givesomefucks@lemmy.worldEnglish
    1223·
    10 months ago

    OP has a five month account with zero posts or comments besides this essay…

    So which of the banned accounts were you OP?

    • Throwaway
      51·
      10 months ago

      Is that really a problem? Calling out a bad mod team on their community once you’ve been affected? Assuming hes not spamming it, shit talking mod is fine on the sub I mod.

    • root@withachanceof.comOP
      107·
      10 months ago

      The other one from @withachanceof.com, @foo@withachanceof.com specifically. I’m not hiding anything here and would have posted this from that account if it wasn’t banned without warning and without having any prior rule violations. I run my own Lemmy instance, although likely not for much longer if this is how the mods on one of the largest Lemmy instances behave as I don’t care to be part of a community where legitimate differences of opinion are censored by the powers that be. I guess I can look forward to being defederated from in the near future now. Oh well.

      • givesomefucks@lemmy.worldEnglish
        186·
        10 months ago

        You accused someone of being a shill, called the post propaganda, then encouraged people to downvote you…

        And you don’t understand why your comment was removed for civility?

        Also, your instance has three users, and as soon as you replied I got three down votes…

        That’s the saddest thing in a while man. Take a deep breath, put down the alts, and think about if I sulting people may e isn’t the best plan if you want to stop getting banned from places.

        • root@withachanceof.comOP
          59·
          10 months ago

          Believe what you want, but I don’t downvote comments that are contributing to the conversation even if I don’t agree with them. Imaginary internet points don’t mean anything.

          This is not about my comment in particular. It’s about how the modlog clearly shows that the mods have removed all comments critical of Hamas and banned the users. If you read further into the modlog an even more problematic trend of them censoring anything they don’t agree with emerges using rule 1 as a guise.

          • givesomefucks@lemmy.worldEnglish
            125·
            10 months ago

            Believe what you want

            That insulting people gets your comments removed for violating civility rules?

            Yeah, I’m gonna keep believing that, seems to be working out so far.

            But I’d suggest you stop believing when your accounts get banned it’s a crazy conspiracy… It just that you keep insulting people.

      • Throwaway
        54·
        10 months ago

        Yeah it sucks. The ml in Lemmy.ml literally stands for marxist leninst. That way of thinking leads to all sorts of nonsense, including a politically neutral community supporting a terrorist group that broke the previous cease fire by massacring 1400 civilians.

        I hope it gets better. Other instances arent nearly as bad.