cross-posted from: https://feddit.nl/post/16246531
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.
One of the mods over there is a Russian who refuses to answer whether he’s pro-Russian or not, says Russian propaganda doesn’t exist, pretends to be American while intensely engaging in American threads, denies Uighur genocide, etc etc etc.
https://lemmy.world/u/davel@lemmy.ml
https://lemmygrad.ml/u/davel
He has some older account where there was Russian being used but I think he may have deleted it or I just can’t be arsed to look enough rn.
Anyway, one of the clearest pro-Russian trolls I’ve seen. Lemmy.ml is full of them, I don’t know why lemmy.world federates with them.
Edit. Now he comments only when post is locked. Hey Davel, are you a pro-Russian troll? Reply to this and ignore the bit about being pro-Russian, won’t you? ;>
Edit2 I came on PC to look up the link which he had forgotten in which he’s posted using Russian/Ukrainian (I don’t recognise which one), and the comments I’ve made about him have weirdly been removed. Something that would require a mod. But Pro-Russian Putler-dick loving trolls would never do something like remove comments that disagree with them while actively avoiding answering questions like “why do you support Putin?” “why are you pro-Russian?” **You literally circle-jerk with Yogthos about how you’re “definitely not a mouthpiece for Russian propaganda”, while refusing to answer something as simple as “are you pro-Russian”. It’s cringe. If you had grown up in the west, you’d actually know how ridiculous you sound. :D
Knew exactly who you were taking about before I even saw the links.
Wait, now I’m a Russian pretending to be an American? This tale gets taller every time you tell it 😂
Because LW is just as bad.
.ml is run by angry tankie assholes.
LW is run by moral superiority assholes.
Assholes, assholes everywhere.
But .ee is where all the cool kids hang out, right?
I expected this type of response from idiots who think “omg this guy insulted my instance… that means they insulted me!!!”