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Discussion about lemmy.ml admins abusing Fediverse moderation tools (with proof)

Lemmy.ml tankie censorship problem - Lemmy.World

https://lemmy.world/post/16211417

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 [http://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 [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 [https://lemmy.ml/modlog] of the instance looks like: [https://feddit.nl/pictrs/image/6886b092-43d3-408b-ab57-2fa686f8a6c7.png] 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 [http://lemmy.ml] that I had ever participated in. Proof: [https://feddit.nl/pictrs/image/9c52e470-645f-46ba-ac1d-0b7d8be17af3.png] 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 [http://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 [/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 [http://lemmy.ml] hosted communities in favor of communities on more reasonable instances.

https://lemmy.world/post/16211417

Lemmy.ml, like lemmygrad.ml and hexbear.net, has consistently been accused of improper Federation practices and many instances have decided to ban one or both of the latter by default, with many individual users having already gone further to block the former as well. However, many individual users on lemmy.ml seem unaware of the accusations of the practices of their admins, and some people go so far as to see lemmy.ml as a sort of default instance on the Fediverse.

This discussion promotes wider knowledge of the situation and what might be done about it in the future, in order to e.g. not turn away new potential Federation members (Fedizens?:-) that could otherwise associate what happens on that instance as something relating to the Fediverse as a whole.

39 comments

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KevinCostner

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Checking up on the Mod Log regularly reveals exactly how petty and unhinged many mods on Fedi are. Suppression of political ideas is the main one.

mesamunefire

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One of the best features of lemmy. A bit of transparency is great.

OpenStars

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Except when that process gets subverted by someone with admin access to the database, as the OP discussion mentions:-(. But when it works properly, absolutely yes:-).

bluGill

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Well worth doing once in a while. Though only when you are feeling extra "tough". I just did and saw a lot of hateful comments I'm glad are gone, but also 2 (both from lemmy.ml) that look perfectly on topic. At least we can find out what our moderators are doing.

OpenStars

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I for one go there extremely rarely, and only to look up specific matters. It does not help that something (post or comment) could be removed by either a community moderator, on one instance, or an admin, on an entirely different instance. But I am glad that there are people that analyze it:-).

I used to be a mod of a small and then another medium-sized (for a niche) community on Reddit. Since coming to Kbin and then Lemmy, I have not volunteered to moderate anything. We need people to, but it's an extremely depressing job.

It's like politicians: we need them, but the role tends to attract the attentions of those least suited to get it done:-(. And the actual GOOD ones tend to not stay for long - perhaps a year or two, if they actually care about the community that they moderate:-|.

Paragone

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I'm banned-for-life from there.

Russia invaded/desecrated/butchered Ukraina, & I remember what the vids showed of Mariupol ( sorry spelling ).

I made a comment on there to the effect that if Putin was the pusher of the war, then making things as politically-difficult for Putin in the election would be a Good Thing(tm).

( to me, the obvious implied-point is that it might have ended an immensely-wasting-of-life war that people other than Putin weren't so interested in, and that, by definition, must therefore be a Good Thing(tm) )

Anybody who pushes Russia's butchering of Ukraina as something which cannot be spoken-against, is fucking terrorist-at-heart.

Just my opinion, but there I've no right to such opinion.

The beauty of this?

It perfectly demonstrates how segregation-of-ideologies allows positive-feedback-loops, which produces extremism.

Left, right, political, religious, moneyarchist, legalist, nationalist, sexist/genderist, ALL ideologies are self-amplifying.

There's a book on the US's political-segregation ( "The Big Sort" ) & it looks like that mechanism, ideological-segregation, has only 1 outcome: butchery/war.

So, given the evidence, it looks like the whole world is going to be butchering everybody within a .. decade or so.

Amplification, feedback-loop, polarization, and nothing is countering its controlling of the process of this world..

it's got an outcome.

And if our world's population won't stop/prevent the "drunk driver" from force-crashing our "bus" with all our world's peoples in it .. well, then we get crashed/killed.

The Great Filter.

WHEN one has cancer, THEN is it right to KILL that cancer??

WHEN one is newly-infected with rabies, THEN is it valid to prime one's immune-system to as violently as possible defend one's life against rabies?

Or should we just make-nice, live in making-believing, & hope that our hopium works??

What Russia's been doing to Ukraina, what Hamas got Israel to be doing against the Palestinians & all the journalists..

do we let rabies overrun our world's life?

Will the US allow rabies to overrun its life?

( yes, obviously.

The others .. likewise.

Therefore, Universe's Natural Selection is looking to be .. "pruning" our world from the worlds-in-Universe-with-civilized-life-on-them, this century .. isn't it? )

_ /\ _

OpenStars

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ALL ideologies are self-amplifying.

I would put it differently, I think: all ideologies can become amplified, but they do not necessarily have to be. I tend to find that people of character can discourse on anything at all, whereas people lacking character cannot discourse on much if anything without it devolving into a fight - for the latter, fighting is the point, not a(n unfortunate) by-product of the discussion topic at hand. For people whose ultimate end-goal is Truth, then what idea could possibly be a "cancer"? Though for people whose goal is rather Control, every dissenting opinion must be rooted out & destroyed. But I would say that it is not "facts" that are the deadly things, and rather "attitudes", like whether someone values Truth vs. Control. I hope that makes some semblance of sense:-P.

Also, there's a difference between labelling something and censoring it. You getting banned is an example of the latter, whereas e.g. X's adding a note that "this post may contain misinformation" would be the former. In movies, labelling porn as X or XXX or whatever, and more "adult" movies as R, "young teenager" movies as PG-13, child aka "general audience" movies as G, allows people to pick and choose what they want (though e.g. to get into a PG-13 movie, someone younger than 13 needs an adult present). But then when you have people arguing not about facts but which authoritarian viewpoint is going to be force-fed to the masses, neither labelling nor censoring is going to be possible in a manner to please both sides, b/c the truth cannot be agreed upon first, nor even THAT the truth should matter at all in the first place.

Some places, like Wikipedia put in ENORMOUS investments of effort (time, attention, real WORK) to getting something that everyone can more or less agree upon. e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Donald_Trump says not that "he's totally innocent, framed I tell ya!" nor "he's guilty as sin and should be shot", but the bare-bones facts that:

In May 2024, a jury in New York found Trump guilty on 34 felony counts of falsifying business records related to a hush-money payment to Stormy Daniels, making him the only former U.S. president to be convicted of a crime. He has been indicted in three other jurisdictions on 54 other felony counts related to his mishandling of classified documents and efforts to overturn the 2020 presidential election. In separate civil proceedings in New York state court, Trump was found liable for sexual abuse and defamation in 2023 and for financial fraud in 2024.

This will not stop people from interpreting these facts however they wish, but these words do serve the purpose of being recorded in a purely factual manner for the sake of a public record.

Conversely, social media is not worth that amount of attention, so moderators resort to simply censoring it. It's the nature of the game, which we sign up for by commenting to such a place in the first place. We are entitled to nothing. Though we can comment on our POV from our experiences, and e.g. if we don't like their admin practices, we can - and should - leave lemmy.ml and move on to better places where we are more free to discuss things among people who care more about facts than authoritarian regimes propped up by censorship of dissenting opinions (and yes, contrarian facts).

But first, we need to acknowledge that it is happening, as we are doing now. And then share that knowledge with others who may be taken unawares, so that they too do not have to go through all the pain that you did, in having to find that out first-hand. :-)